http://www.geek.com/articles/news/world ... s-2009025/
WorldPay hack collects $9 million in just 30 minutes
A hack carried out last year on the RBS WorldPay servers has turned out to be a lot more lucrative than was first thought.
When the hack was first reported WorldPay said that only 100 Payroll cards had been affected – Payroll cards are like debit cards that employees can use with their pay put directly on to them. With only 100 cards involved in the fraud you would expect the level of fraud to be quite low as you can only remove so many hundreds of dollars from each one.
However, the hack carried out on the WorldPay servers drastically increased or removed that withdrawal limit. So each of the 100 cards could be used multiple times drawing out the maximum allowed for a single transaction at an ATM machine. The hacker also stole the details of around 1.5 million people who use the Payroll cards allowing the cards to be cloned with different personal details.
Not only did the hacker manage to change the card limits somehow, he/she also had the organizational power to mobilize individuals in 49 cities around the world (including Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Montreal, Moscow, and Hong Kong) to start using the cards at the same time. On November 8 last year this small army of ATM visitors set to work withdrawing as much cash as they could in a 30-minute period. The end result – this single hack netted over $9 million.
The FBI have been involved with the investigation and Agent Ross Rice commented to Fox:
We’ve seen similar attempts to defraud a bank through ATM machines but not, not anywhere near the scale we have here … Over 130 different ATM machines in 49 cities worldwide were accessed in a 30-minute period on November 8 … So you can get an idea of the number of people involved in this and the scope of the operation.
The authorities are hoping they can track down some of the people who carried out the actual ATM transactions to figure out who masterminded this operation.
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