cyber crime

South Korean police reported Thursday that over 30 North Korean hackers were recruited to work in China by a South Korean criminal ring. The hackers stole personal data of South Korean gamers and transferred $5 million to North Korea.

Seoul blamed North Korea for distributing malicious software to paralyze web sites of government agencies and businesses as well as orchestrating a cyber attack on a South Korean bank this year that brought down its network.

One of NATO website was hacked, as reported by the alliance Thursday. The e-Bookshop website, operated by an external company, contained no classified data and is now blocked.

Police dealing with cyber crimes had notified the alliance of "a probable data breach," the statement said without providing details.

"NATO'S e-Bookshop is a separate service for the public for the release of NATO information and does not contain any classified data," the statement said.
 

Land court in Dusseldorf, Germany, ruled that DDoS attacks on servers should be inflicted with the imprisonment for 10 years.

The ruling was brought in March 2011 but it has been published only now. The reason was the block of bookmaker websites. A convicted person tried to blackmail owners of online services through attacking their servers placed in Russia.

Three owners of the six agreed to pay to the perpetrator but the rest refused which led to the blocking of their websites. As a result they suffered losses accounting for hundreds of thousands of euro.

Banking customers in Poland were hit by a version of the Zeus malware that intercepts one-time pass codes sent via SMS. On Monday the security vendor F-Secure blogged about the attack on the clients of the Polish financial institution ING. The issue was further analyzed on the website of security consultant Piotr Konieczny.

The new attack appears to be the same type found by the Spanish security company S21sec last September.

Cybercrime costs the British economy £27 billion ($43.5 billion) each year according to a new stats reported by the government.

The Office of Cyber Security & Information Assurance and consultancy Detica reported that the amount includes a £21 billion cost to business, of which £9.2 billion results from theft of intellectual property (IP) and £7.6 billion from industrial espionage.

Yevgeny Anikin, a hacker who was convicted of the $9 million hack of RBS WorldPay has avoided jail and has been given only a suspended sentence.

Anikin, a 27 Russian, was given a suspended sentence of five years on Monday, according to Russian state news agency RIA Novosti, after pleading guilty to what the U.S. has called “perhaps the most sophisticated and organized computer fraud attack ever conducted.”

According to the report Anikin expressed regret for his role in the crime and said: “I want to say that I repent and fully admit my guilt.”

According to new stats from Javelin Strategy & Research the number of victims of ID theft has declined by over a quarter in the United States last year. However, individual victims lost more money on average than ever before.

Javelin Strategy & Research published the results of the annual survey of consumer fraud which showed that total annual reported fraud was down to $37 billion in 2010 from $56 billion in 2009, but the average out-of-pocket loss soared to $631 from $387, over 60% increase.

What cyber threats businesses and consumers should expect in 2011? This question was discussed by WebProNews with Paul Wood, MessageLabs Intelligence Sr. Analyst at Symantec Hosted Services.

Prosecutors in Moldova arrested six corrupt bank insiders which turned to be ZeuS money mule suspects. It was found during the investigation that half dozen of the suspects worked in local banks in the east European country. Investigators reckon the suspects specialised in laundering Western Union and MoneyGram payments received from co-conspirators in the West that can ultimately be traced back to compromised corporate and personal bank accounts.

A new survey commissioned by Symantec revealed that about 2/3 of all Internet users have been attacked by some sort of cyber crime, and a surprisingly large percentage of them felt guilty about that.

The survey polled more than 7,000 Internet users in 14 countries and found that 65% of Internet users worldwide have already been victims. In the U.S., it's 73 percent, but things are worse in China (83 percent), Brazil (76 percent) and India (also 76 percent).

Consumer Reports released a report that shows over half of all social networking users are posting too much personal information which puts them at high risk of being scammed by cyber crooks.

The United Nations is called upon by the Council of Europe for wider ratification of the only international cybercrime treaty in a move to make international efforts to combat Internet crimes more consolidated.

From April 12 to April 19 the UN is holding its 12th congress on crime prevention and criminal justice in Salvador, Brazil. Cybercrime will be among the topics of the agenda.

In a move to thwart cybercrime Russian Coordination Center for the .ru top-level domain will start applying stricter rules when registering individuals or businesses for .ru domain addresses.

According to the reports starting April 1 all the applicants who want to register a .ru domain address will be required to submit a copy of a passport or legal registration papers.

It is well known that Russia is a haven for cybercrooks because it is so hard to bring criminal charges in that country. Thereby, it is not a surprise when another cyber crook operates from there.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation released its another report on the top Internet scams of 2009.

Last week Internet community rejoiced over the take down of the Mariposa and Waladec botnets. Still many security experts think this is not the definitive victory and in fact the winning is too small. It is the prosecution of the orchestrators behind such criminal schemes that will make the fight against botnents efficient.