DOJ: Credit Card Thefts Helped by 'Well Designed' Software
Currency counter, Glock, offshore banks and global players skated right past IT security.
The feds asked the CERT Coordinating Center to give an opinion of the software it found. CERT told the U.S. investigators that the "core sniffer program" is "efficient, well designed and uses some algorithms and data structures that reflect college-level knowledge of computer programming skills..."
The thieves were tenacious, too. When an effort to break into a restaurant's point-of-sale server in Arundel, Md., failed, the intruders went straight to the restaurant chain's corporate network in Dallas, and from there, they installed packet sniffers at some of the 49 Dave & Buster's restaurants, including one in Islandia, N.Y. From that store alone, data from more than 5,000 credit cards was obtained. Of those cards, 675 were used to make unauthorized purchases at various retail and online stores, running up losses of $600,000.
Gonzalez was named in the Dave & Buster's case. Others alleged to be involved in the crime ring include Aleksandr "Jonny Hell" Suvorov, of Sillamae, Estonia; Maksym "Maksik" Yastremskiy, of Kharkov, Ukraine; and Hung-Ming Chiu and Zhi Wang, both of the People's Republic of China.
DOJ
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