New York Cell Millions of Dollars World Wide ATM Hackers

Seven people were arrested in the U.S., accused of operating the New York cell of what prosecutors said was a network that carried out thefts at ATMs in 27 countries from Canada to Russia. Law enforcement agencies from more than a dozen nations were involved in the investigation, U.S. prosecutors in New York said Thursday.

"Unfortunately these types of cybercrimes involving ATMs, where you've got a flash mob going out across the globe, are becoming more and more common," said Rose Romero, a former federal prosecutor and regional director for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

"I expect there will be many more" of these types of crimes, she said.

Here's how it worked:
Hackers got into bank databases, eliminated withdrawal limits on pre-paid debit cards and created access codes. Others loaded that data onto any plastic card with a magnetic stripe — an old hotel key card or an expired credit card worked fine as long as it carried the account data and correct access codes.

Such ATM fraud schemes are not uncommon, but the $45 million stolen in this one was at least double the amount involved in previously known cases.

The accused ringleader in the U.S. cell, Alberto Yusi Lajud-Pena, was reportedly killed in the Dominican Republic late last month, prosecutors said. More investigations continue and other arrests have been made in other countries, but prosecutors did not have details.

An indictment unsealed Thursday accused Lajud-Pena and the other seven New York suspects of withdrawing $2.8 million in cash from hacked accounts in less than a day.

Lajud-Pena was found dead with a suitcase full of about $100,000 in cash, and the investigation into his death is continuing separately. Dominican officials said they arrested a man in the killing who said it was a botched robbery, and two other suspects were on the lam.

The first federal study of ATM fraud was 30 years ago, when the use of computers in the financial community was growing rapidly. At the time, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found nationwide ATM bank loss from fraud ranged from $70 and $100 million a year.

By 2008, that had risen to about $1 billion a year, said Ken Pickering, who works in security intelligence at CORE Security, a white-hat hacking firm that offers security to businesses.

He said he expects news of the latest ring to inspire other criminals.

"Once you see a large attack like this, that they made off with $45 million, that's going to wake up the cybercrime community," he said.

"Ripping off cash, you don't get that back," he said. "There are suitcases full of cash floating around now, and that's just gone."

Read More... http://news.yahoo.com/global-network-hackers-steal-45m-atms-072335721.html

Hollywood Targeted by Chinese Hackers

At least one Burbank studio has been hacked, experts say, and piracy is rampant in "a culture of copying."

Have Chinese hackers invaded Hollywood's computers, as they have the systems of Facebook, Apple, The New York Times and more than 100 other major Western entities? While some studio sources say no, cybersecurity experts tell THR another story.

"Yes, absolutely," says cyber-espionage expert Dmitri Alperovitch, former vp threat research at McAfee and co-founder of CrowdStrike. "I know of major Hollywood studios that have worked on distribution rights and other negotiations with Chinese companies and have been hacked before those negotiations had been completed because the Chinese wanted their negotiation playbook. The other side knows exactly what they're planning to do and will cheat and get their way in the negotiation."

Says James Fallows, National Book Award-winning author of National Defense and a New York Emmy winner for hosting Doing Business in China: "There is military hacking. There is corporate espionage. There are 'unruly youth' -- the kind of people who in other countries would be tagging buildings with graffiti. In China right now, they're hacking into the Pentagon."

And hacking into Hollywood. "I know of several incidents, especially within the last year, where a pretty large studio in Burbank has had a lot of their intellectual property pretty much lifted," says a consultant at Element Digital Security Services. "It's pretty hard to combat. Say it's a secretary or somebody working in HR: When they click on a link in a bogus email message, it'll generate an attack payload and give the attacker control of the desktop. So they've bypassed millions of dollars' worth in firewalls and other perimeter controls."

Besides using such spearphishing tactics, potential Chinese partners of American businesses have used proof-of-concept presentations as a ruse to reverse-engineer technology cheaply and hacked into laptops of business partners. "I knew a lot of guys at Qualcomm­ that tried to do deals in China, and as soon as you plugged into the network, they had a Tiger Team break into your laptop and steal all of your stuff," says the consultant.

The root of the problem lies in China's contempt for intellectual property. Most video and software consumed in China is pirated, and it is widely rumored that the People's Liberation Army runs the trade. In his new book China Airborne, Fallows calls China "a culture of copying." The idea of a global free market enriching all is not what businesspeople there are after. "Everyone is grabbing everything they can," a top Chinese professor told Fallows.

"Copying is more taken for granted among companies -- much like any country during its period of rapid catch-up development," Fallows says, citing Britain's bitter grousing about American intellectual theft in the 1700s and 1800s.

The difference between the U.S. in 1700 and China in 2013 is that China has bigger plans and a quicker timeline. The Chinese Academy of Sciences predicted in January that its economy would overtake the U.S. by 2049, and building an entertainment industry is part of that plan.

"It's a lot easier to steal than to build," says Alperovitch. "The Chinese have mastered that art in cyberspace perfectly."

Read More... http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cybersecurity-hollywood-targeted-by-chinese-425984