Trojan Plunders $480k From Cumberland County Redevelopment Authority Online Bank Account
A Pennsylvania organization that helps develop affordable housing learned a painful lesson about the hazards of online banking using the Windows operating system when a notorious trojan siphoned almost $480,000 from its account.
News reports say $479,247 vanished from a bank account belonging to the Cumberland County Redevelopment Authority after it was hit by Clampi. The trojan gets installed by tricking users into clicking on a file attached to email and then lies in wait for the victim to log in to online financial websites. The authority has so far been able to recover $109,467 of the stolen loot.
The theft is part of a rash of online heists that have stolen millions of dollars from businesses and non-profit organizations. While circumstances are different in each case, they all point to a single point of failure: Each theft relied on the successful compromise of a Windows-based system.
It was this undeniable fact that led Brian Krebs – author of the Security Fix blog which over the past month has published a series of articles detailing high-stakes bank thefts – to recommend Windows machines no longer be used by those who choose to do their banking online.
“I do not offer this recommendation lightly,” he wrote. “But I have interviewed dozens of victim companies that lost anywhere from $10,000 to $500,000 dollars because of a single malware infection.”
Indeed, the Clampi variant that hit the Cumberland redevelopment authority reportedly was able to succeed even though employees used an automated clearing house token that generated a different eight-digit access code every minute or so. Redevelopment authority officials didn’t return calls seeking comment.
Credit: The Register
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