Posted on 05/26/2005 5:33:12 AM PDT by P.O.E.
In an unmarked building in downtown Washington, Brian K. Nagel and 15 other Secret Service agents manned a high-tech command center, poised for the largest-ever roundup of a cybercrime gang. A huge map of the U.S., spread across 12 digital screens, gave them a view of their prey, from Arizona to New Jersey. It was Tuesday, Oct. 26, 2004, and Operation Firewall was about to be unleashed. The target: the ShadowCrew, a gang whose members were schooled in identity theft, bank account pillage, and the fencing of ill-gotten wares on the Web, police say. For months, agents had been watching their every move through a clandestine gateway into their Web site, shadowcrew.com. To ensure the suspects were at home, a gang member-turned-informant had pressed his pals to go online for a group meeting.
There's a new breed of crime-fighter prowling cyberspace: the hacker hunters. Spurred by big profits, professional cyber-criminals have replaced amateur thrill-seeking hackers as the biggest threat on the Web. Software defenses are improving rapidly, but law enforcement and security companies understand they can no longer rely on technology alone to deal with the plague of virus attacks, computer break-ins, and online scams. Instead, they're marshaling their forces and using gumshoe tactics to fight back -- infiltrating hacker groups, monitoring their chatter on underground networks, and when they can, busting the baddies before they do any more damage. "The wave of the future is getting inside these groups, developing intelligence, and taking them down," says Christopher M.E. Painter, deputy chief of the Computer Crime section of the Justice Dept., who will help prosecute ShadowCrew members at a trial scheduled for October.
Remainder of article here.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessweek.com ...
Under the "related items" sidebar on the right are some graphics and articles worth checking out.
The HangUp Team has been operating in Russia with impunity for years.
Little was heard from the HangUp Team for the next two years. But in 2003 the gang released the viruses Berbew and Webber. Then last year the group infected online stores with a fiendish piece of software called the Scob worm. Scob waited for Web surfers to connect, then planted software in their hard disks that spied on their typing and relayed thousands of passwords and credit-card numbers to a server in Russia, police say. "These guys have set a new standard for sophistication among criminal hackers," says A. James Melnick, 51, director of threat intelligence at iDEFENSE, a Reston (Va.) cybersecurity firm.
The HangUp crew isn't even covering its tracks. Each of the three bugs contained a telltale signature: "Coded by HangUp Team." With HangUp operating so publicly, it's not clear why its members have been so hard to catch. Russian authorities say they have been hampered by the red tape of securing warrants, coordinating with U.S. and British police, and translating documents.
Just kill them.
As for killing hackers that do billion dollar damage I in no way meant that the consequences should be limited to Russians.
I'm with you.
Computer/internet wars could end up dwarfing the 'Drug War' too. Looks like the money might be a lot bigger in cyber-crime than in drugs. If not yet then soon.
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