The Biggest Digital Heist in History Isn’t Over Yet

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-25/the-biggest-digital-heist-in-history-isn-t-over-yet

by wp381640 • 8 years ago

161 89 8 years ago

bloomberg.com

adreamingsoul2• 8 years ago

Am I the only one that finds it suspicious that one of these guys would drop a debit card at a heist?

eumoria• 8 years ago

Especially in the sentence prior to it where it says "the ATM started disgorging cash without either man touching it"

What's the bank card for if they just stood there and it spit money out in a timed fashion?

adreamingsoul2• 8 years ago

Yeah, maybe the author of that article was having a bit of leeway with the story or the facts being presented to us are questionable. Either way, it doesn't give me a lot of trust or confidence in the truth of that article.

neilk4• 8 years ago

Good catch.

Either it's a misstatement from the author, or law enforcement don't want to reveal how they actually caught them.

huac2• 8 years ago

the ATM was a Taiwanese ATM, and they were Russian, so they could have had their own Russian debit card.

21• 8 years ago

People are always shocked at the stupid mistakes that big criminal masterminds make.

Like the Silk Road guy, "how could he possibly ask on stack overflow using his real name".

And so on.

There are ten thousands different mistakes that you can make, you need to guard against all of them. And against whatever unknown tech exists.

In this story, that dropped bank card turns out to not be that significant. The real breakthrough was identifying another mule through the video surveillance videos, following him to the airport and putting surveillance on the lockers used to store the cash.

He was also emptying ATMs apparently with witnesses behind him. This is like a bad movie. One of those witnesses might as well be an off-duty cop who could just pull out his gun right there.

mv4• 8 years ago

... or the Russian FSB officer forgetting all about VPN and logging on from his office. [1]

People make stupid mistakes.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16653671

philjohn• 8 years ago

The criminals have to be lucky continually - the detectives only need to be lucky once.

greggarious2• 8 years ago

Like the Silk Road guy, "how could he possibly ask on stack overflow using his real name".

I always had the impression that Ross suffered from the fatal flaw that he didn't think what he was doing was wrong. He was an evangelical libertarian, and I think he didn't see "not getting caught" as the #1 priority the way a profit oriented criminal would.

_bxg14• 8 years ago

It sounded like it was one of the "mules" who dropped the card. Probably just some random guys hired cheaply so those in charge didn't have to go out in person; they probably weren't necessarily smart or careful.

professorTuring• 8 years ago

Well, you know what they say:

- You have to be lucky every time to continue free... I only have to be lucky once to catch you.

dmvinson• 8 years ago

The article doesn't really go into the thieves' backgrounds at all strangely enough. How did Katana end up in the bank heist business? How did he acquire the skills to turn making fake bank transactions into an "art"? I always wonder about the kind of person who ends up in these criminal dealings and where they come from.

mywittyname• 8 years ago

He probably worked for a bank. Lots of smart people learn the "loopholes" of their trades.

My mom worked at a car dealership and realized that you could steal a car from them and it would be upwards of a year before they figured it out, since that's when they did inventory. Back then, the keys were all kept in an marginally secured cases.

kolpa7• 8 years ago

Johnny Cash figured how to steal them from the factory

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18cW_yHo3PY

_bxg14• 8 years ago

From the headline alone I assumed it was going to be about the tech industry's theft of the world's data

mikro2nd• 8 years ago

And I thought they were going to talk about cryptocurrencies... :)

ealexhudson• 8 years ago

They do say a lot of theft cash ended up converted to Bitcoin. So, at least a measurable chunk of the liquidity in the market is down to this...

pphysch• 8 years ago

Tether, more specifically

blanderman• 8 years ago

Is it stealing if the person gives it to you?

Rjevski• 8 years ago

Maybe not stealing but extortion. “Give us all your data or you can’t use the service all your friends use to keep in touch”.

It’s even worse when the service we’re talking about goes beyond social networking and becomes a must-have like a cell phone (referring to major US carriers secretly selling location data to a marketing company).

dang• 8 years ago

I'm sure you did, but could you please not post unsubstantive comments to HN? This kind of thing leads to low-quality discussion.

neilk4• 8 years ago

I've learned to be skeptical when I see law enforcement praising the l337 skillz of their targets.

    > “This guy is in another league, he’s like Rafa Nadal
    > playing tennis,” Yuste says. “There are few people in
    > the world capable of doing what he did.”

It sounds really cool (and budget-justifying) to be chasing some mastermind, and a journalist is likely to pump up that aspect of the story too. Because they know we're reading it to be entertained, for there to be suspense, to enjoy the frisson of a "victimless" crime requiring ingenuity, like Ocean's 11.

Then you find out later it's just a python script probing for default passwords, or someone who learned some of nmap's command-line switches.

_bxg14• 8 years ago

Yeah; I also have the general impression (admittedly without much data to support it) that IT security at banks and other gargantuan, long-lived institutions is pretty crappy? I would think it's easy to get in, and hard to not get caught.

Anecdotally, I have a friend who briefly worked at a company which exclusively makes software for financial institutions. Their product was a web app that only worked in a version of Internet Explorer so old, it didn't support Ajax. Asynchronous requests were made by changing the src attribute of a 1px <iframe>.

This was in 2015.

jiveturkey• 8 years ago

IT security at banks ... is pretty crappy? I would think it's easy to get in, and hard to not get caught.

Yes it is not state of the art. They need a compliance regime in order to be secure, and they meet that and that only. But I think you're missing an aspect, things like passwords that change daily and require collusion, advanced social engineering, physical access, etc.

Further, being easy to get caught is the definition of good security. It's super easy to physically enter a bank and take all available cash at gunpoint. Nearly impossible to get away with it. That's good security. Extend that to the digital realm.

dsfyu404ed• 8 years ago

I would think it's easy to get in, and hard to not get caught.

Imagine you're an new employee at a big old company with a lot of legacy tech that's had mediocre maintenance and documentation over the years as is typical. You are going to leave footprints everywhere just learning to do your job. Imagine how many footprints you leave when you're an outsider who has to learn it all from scratch without documentation or assistance from other employees with historical knowledge. Now try getting anything done in that system without leaving tracks or triggering alerts when you hit some API that even the employees don't knows exists. The reason nobody ever gets caught is because insurance doesn't usually require a conviction before paying out and the effort required to determine who broke in is much higher than figuring out the exact sequence of events because you'd have to do the same investigation on every compromised system they used along the way.

chaostheory• 8 years ago

The door code for one of the US's top banks' offices used to be 0000. I wonder if they finally changed it? EA QAs their games better than a lot of financial institutions as well

vpmpaul2• 8 years ago

It is and it is (sorta). I worked in the bank industry for many years and I could have stolen money a hundred different ways without getting caught.

The problem is that in the end the money has to go somewhere or be spent (why else steal it?). Also to live a legal life (house,car,boat) you have to have a source of income/spending that does not set off red flags. If you are a high paid bank employee why even bother? Many (most?) financial type crimes have no statue of limitations so to get away you literally have to get away with it for the rest of your life. The other side is even if you get away you will spend the rest of your life wondering if today is the day you get caught. To be honest I think that is why so many white collar crimes are so brazen looking. I think they would rather go to jail for a few years be done with it and live the rest of their lives with the money they have "lost".

Unless you live in a country like Russia where stealing money from the US is basically legal. Then go for it.

jjeaff• 8 years ago

I have a friend who briefly worked at a company which exclusively makes software for financial institutions.

Sounds like Jack Henry. My bank uses them for their client web portal. Up until last year, they had an 8 character max limit on your password, and you couldn't use any special characters or spaces.

But at least they make you verify your "personal photo" every time you log in. Which is more than useless since I assume they are trying to protect you from phishing and any decent phishing attempt would just skip that step and no one would notice. Or, if they wanted, they could just port your username to the real site and pass the photo along to you through the phishing site UI.

Deimorz2• 8 years ago

Asynchronous requests were made by changing the src attribute of a 1px <iframe>.

And you're posting on a site that still does it that way - voting on HN works by creating an <img> and setting the src attribute to the vote url.

wmeredith• 8 years ago

Easy to get in, but hard not to get caught has always been the case. Anyone with a lack of morals can go execute tellers and pull money out of cash drawers. But they’ll be in jail by the end of the day.

jtms• 8 years ago

The fact they supposedly recovered 15k Bitcoins tells me he wasn't sophisticated enough to secure his private key sufficiently. If he had memorized a BIP39 mnemonic for his private key we wouldn't be reading about $162 million dollars worth getting seized. Brain wallets are pretty tough to crack.

magnetic• 8 years ago

A wrench is all you need apparently. https://xkcd.com/538/

cgh2• 8 years ago

That particular quote concerned Katana's ability to move money between banks, not his "hacking" prowess. In fact, the article even refers to their methods as "class spear-phishing", implying there wasn't anything special behind their methods.

pembrook2• 8 years ago

This is a problem with pretty much all media stories. There's money to made making things seem dramatic and spectacular and out of the ordinary...when most things just aren't.

MR4D2• 8 years ago

I wonder if anyone accused of these things has ever thought to bring in HN users as expert witnesses.

I'm sure even a random sample would cause a huge reduction in these inflated "master hacker" claims.

It seems that if you can have a few people rationally explain to a jury what the accused did, the crimes would seem much less diabolical.

kolpa7• 8 years ago

Generally, defendants don't need to defend against bombastic statements in the media. In fact, such statements can help the defendant, as they can prejudice and disqualify jurors, leading to mistrial.

_wmd• 8 years ago

It's valid concern, but I'm not so sure in this case. Spear phishing is a skilled art, and requires relatively significant knowledge of the target and their domain. Sure the rest is a essentially a stackoverflow post away, but it requires real determination to research this kind of attack and real skill to carry it out and see it through to millions in cash popping from ATMs in foreign countries. Just the people management alone is impressive

And finally, I don't think stackoverflow cover ATM maintenance procedures yet. These guys weren't kiddies

neilk4• 8 years ago

I'm not saying they are script kiddies. I make no claim about their skills. I have no idea what it takes to pull of a conspiracy like this.

I'm just saying I don't believe sensationalizing journalists or law enforcement. Pretty much every time when I've known anything about the case, there have been wild exaggerations.

greedo• 8 years ago

People management is a challenge, but spear-fishing? It's one of the easiest methods of penetrating a company.

sandworm101• 8 years ago

> Someone had sent emails to the bank’s employees with Microsoft Word attachments, purporting to be from suppliers such as ATM manufacturers. It was a classic spear-phishing gambit.

Microsoft Windows + Outlook Email + Attached word document = the Drake equation for internet security. No matter how secure each of these things are individually, when added together infection becomes inevitable.

Why does outlook have to pass such documents to Word? Why does Word have to open and run macros so willingly? Why does Windows allow word to talk to the internet so easily? I just don't understand the use case these links are meant to address. Are there really so people out there installing software via links inside word documents? That this has to be a seamless user experience? There are so many opportunities to limit such such infections. Why do we still tolerate this?

bena• 8 years ago

Every piece is desired in some fashion.

We want Outlook to open our attachments without having to explicitly choosing the program.

We want Word to have those advanced macro features.

We want Word to have hyperlinks to things on the internet.

We want to be able to install things downloaded from the internet.

In isolation, each of those things are desirable to some segment of the userbase. It just so happens that the chain basically allows you to install a program from an email attachment.

cgh2• 8 years ago

> Why do we still tolerate this?

This is the real question. The thieves are just a symptom of the real infection: terrible, insecure client software. I'm not sure what the solution is but I am pretty sure it involves Microsoft having skin in the game somehow.

r00fus• 8 years ago

I'm sure it doesn't have anything to do with Microsoft's willingness to roll over to the US government (PRISM, NSAKEY).

sneak• 8 years ago

Not all of us do. I personally find Windows usage entirely unacceptable in security-sensitive environments.

kolpa7• 8 years ago

Microsoft Office was years ahead of the Open Web / JavaScript in providing all the convenience and security of remote code execution at the request of arbitrary untrusted third-party systems.

wazoox• 8 years ago

Reminds me of the book "Stealing the network - how to own a continent", it was a fun read back then...

https://books.google.fr/books/about/Stealing_the_Network.htm...

ur-whale3• 8 years ago

One interesting bit is the "laundering through a bitcoin warehouse he bought in China".

I suspect this is actually a Bitcoin mining farm:

In goes dirty money, to buy mining hardware in bulk.

Out comes fresh, never-transacted-with Bitcoin block rewards.

It is fairly hard for authorities to trace the wash: in Bitcoin land, block rewards are the least-tainted kind of coins.

freeloop10• 8 years ago

It is fairly hard for authorities to trace the wash: in Bitcoin land, block rewards are the least-tainted kind of coins.

Also, the most anonymous.

SilasX3• 8 years ago

But I thought Bitcoin mining hardware was all online-only sales?

ur-whale3• 8 years ago

We're not talking about buying a couple of miner machines here, but financing a whole warehouse filled with them.

alanfranzoni• 8 years ago

I thought it was an article about Bitcoin.

adiack• 8 years ago

Nowadays everything runs on SAAS, why are banks and other institutions letting key people use MS windows and outlook in the first place. Don't you reduce your risk by like 90% by using Linux clients instead?

The Biggest Digital Heist in History Isn’t Over Yet

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