Information Security News: Stakeouts, Lucky Breaks Snare Six More in Citibank ATM Heist

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/06/fbi-arrests-six.html

By Kevin Poulsen 
Threat Level
Wired.com
June 24, 2008 

Citibank officials monitoring their network for fraud on Thursday, May 
8, noticed suspicious ATM transactions at 8:30 p.m., coming through the 
five cash machines in the vestibule of a Citibank branch at 65th Street 
and Madison Avenue in New York City's Upper East Side.

As luck would have it, a bank employee -- probably a corporate security 
official -- was already staking out the branch from across the street.

Three months had passed since Citibank notified the FBI that a hacker 
managed to steal customer-account numbers and PIN codes, in an attack on 
a server that processes transactions from Citi-branded ATMs at 7-Eleven 
convenience stores. In late February and early March, the FBI and the 
U.S. Secret Service arrested two Ukrainian immigrants and two alleged 
co-conspirators for allegedly using the stolen PINs to steal $2 million 
in cash from unsuspecting Citibank customers.

But the arrests didn't stop the fraud, which sprang from perhaps the 
most serious computer intrusion into a bank system to date. The FBI has 
recently made at least six more arrests in New York -- bringing the 
total to 10 -- thanks to information from arrested scam suspects, a 
lucky traffic stop, and an undercover operation that at one point had 
Eastern European hackers chasing a female FBI agent through the streets 
of New York, trying to mug her for ATM-card-programming gear.

Six months after the 2007 breach, Wired.com is receiving scattered 
reports of Citibank customers still suffering mysterious withdrawals 
from their bank accounts.

[...]


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