(near) Cyberheist at Sumitomo Bank

John Leydon over at The Register has a great article on the recently announced failed cyberheist targeting Sumitomo Bank - "How police busted UK's biggest cybercrime case".

It's well worth the read.

I hadn't realized that the attempted heist was conducted back in 2006 and that the police had been working on the case for a couple of years. When I read previous news stories it kind of sounded like an open & shut case - but evidently not.

On a related note, someone recently asked me about the use of commercial keyloggers and why you'd want to use them? Well, there are several reasons:

1. They're plentiful and you can purchase them online with a credit card.
2. Many are designed to be used within corporate environments and their manufacturers have agreements with the major anti-virus companies to NOT raise a client-side alert to their presence (since its "probable" that the IT department installed the keylogger intentionally for HR/police monitoring purposes).
3. Many of the commercial keyloggers allow you to download trial versions, and you can also acquire licence key generators from many of the warez sites (i.e. you don't even need to pay the money if you were criminally inclined).
4. Typing "keylogger" in to Google will yield pages of links to commercial keyloggers first (lazy criminals ;-)

If you're interested in learning more about keylogging technologies, I wrote a couple of blogs on the topic a while back over on my main Web site www.technicalinfo.net.

• Professional Keylogging
• Commercial Keylogging