Sunday, October 24, 1993

Russian Hacker Activity According to the Associated Press last week, computer hackers nearly succeeded in stealing 68 billion rubles, or about $57 million, from Russia's Central Bank in August. The unidentified hackers got into the bank's computer using a random combination of access codes, then tried to transfer the money into accounts at commercial banks. The attempt failed because the thieves lost too much time transferring the vast sums, and the bank detected the computer leak. Since the beginning of the year, according to the AP, the Russian Central Bank has discovered attempted thefts and fraud totaling about 300 billion rubles, or $250 million. This was only the latest in a string of thefts and attempted frauds at the state-run bank since the breakup of the Soviet Union, bank officials said. Bank officials told AP that, last year, thieves stole billions of rubles from the bank using false "avisos," or documents transferring money from one bank to another. [fowler@oes.ca.gov (David Fowler) via risks-digest Volume 15, Issue 18] 6:35 # G!

Cracking feature in the small press This week's (October 21) "Coast Weekly", a Monterey County free entertainment (mostly) paper has an article on "hacking" by staff writer Nicole Volpe. I'll quote part of an introduction from the editorial page. "While interviewing computer hackers for this issue, it occurred to me that there are a lot of similarities between reporters and cyberpunks - We share a belief in freedom of information, a general suspicion of those in power who operate secretly, and an unfortunate tendency to invade privacy. This reporter got a taste of what it's like to be on the receiving end of privacy invasion when a hacker I was interviewing handed me a printout of personal information about me that he had retrieved, using nothing more than my home phone number. His reasons were valid enough - he wanted to be sure I was who I said I was. As a reporter I was impressed with the investigation, but on a personal level, it gave me the creeps. It was a lesson they don't teach you in J-school..." The main article covers the exploits of some crackers in the Monterey area, their concern about the Clipper proposal, some stuff about arrests of crackers in other parts of the country, and an interview with a security man from Metromedia's long distance business. The latter says, "If you picked up the phone a year ago, dialed one digit, and then hung up, I could go back and find out what that one digit was. All the records are stored on magnetic tape." [Balance of message was apparently truncated.] [haynes@cats.ucsc.edu (Jim Haynes) via risks-digest Volume 15, Issue 19] 4:33 # G!