Category Archives: Crime

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Cryptographic Lock Baffles the FBI

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Cryptography: The art of writing or solving codes.

Daniel Dantas: A Brazilian banker whose arrested in 2008 for attempting to bribe a police officer. He is also suspected of money laundering, embezzlement and other financial crimes. More importantly, he has managed to fool not only the South American authorities with his cryptographic locks on his numerous hard drives, but also the FBI.

That’s right — since July 2008, when Dantas was arrested, the FBI and officials throughout South America have tried fruitlessly to decrypt files held on the banker’s hardware (a story I first saw this morning on the Schneier on Security blog).

As The Register, a UK-based newspaper, states:

The files were encrypted using Truecrypt and an unnamed algorithm, reportedly based on the 256-bit AES standard. In the UK, Dantas would be compelled to reveal his passphrase under threat of imprisonment, but no such law exists in Brazil. The Brazilian National Institute of Criminology (INC) tried for five months to obtain access to the encrypted data without success before turning over the job to code-breakers at the FBI in early 2009. US computer specialists also drew a blank even after 12 months of efforts to crack the code.

A full year of diligent work from highly-intelligent code breakers and still nothing? Dantas seems to have chosen the right encryption software and password. We’ve seen that choosing a secure password, though very important, seems difficult for many to do. In an article we ran back in April entitled “The Real Enemy,” we highlighted the ignorance of many password-choosers.

Back in 1990, a Unix password study revealed that the most popular password was “12345.” Today, even with the proliferation of hacking and data security warnings, the most popular password, chosen by 320,000 of all users on RockYou [a web app company], was “123456”-an entire digit longer. This was followed by the 1990 favorite “12345” and then, creatively enough, “123456789” and “password.” About 20% of the people on the site picked from a relatively small pool of only 5,000 passwords. According to the data security firm Imperva, these poor passwords mean that “with only minimal effort, a hacker can gain access to one new account every second or 1,000 accounts every 17 minutes.”

It’s 2010 and it seems only Dantas and a handful of others are successful at securely encrypting their sensitive data. What can we learn from this? Choose better passwords, engage encryption software if necessary — and the FBI isn’t as smart as we think.

Somali Pirates: Attacks Down but Reach Spreads

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We’ve covered the pirate crisis in the Gulf of Aden numerous times — once in the February 2009 issue of Risk Management and twice more on this blog (The Rising Price of Piracy Insurance and Security at Sea).

Though the International Maritime Bureau (IMB) states that sea attacks worldwide fell by more than a third in the first quarter of this year, the attacks continue. Pirates are now increasing their area of surveilance and capture (it now includes the massive Indian Ocean) and though U.S. and foreign warships have been canvassing the area, the pirates have not backed down. In fact, their army and area of operation has seemed to grow.

This week alone, three Thai fishing vessels were seized in hijackings 1,200 miles east of Somalia in the Indian Ocean — the farthest from the Somali coast pirates have ever attacked, according to the EU Naval Force. A total off 77 crew were taken hostage.

And just yesterday, in the fourth attack in less than a week, pirates seized a bulk carrier — the Liberian-owned Voc Daisy — in the Gulf of Aden. The ship was heading from the UAE towards to the Suez Canal when it, along with its crew of 21, were taken hostage.

After a successful pirate hijacking, the shipping company that owns the vessel will, in most cases, immediately issue a ransom for the return of the ship and crew. But that may become a bit tougher for American ships should they fall victim to a pirate attack.

The shipping industry has long seen ransom payments to retrieve hijacked vessels, cargos and crews as a cost of doing business. But after Obama last week issued an executive order on Somalia, shipping officials say it’s no longer clear whether companies with U.S. interests can legally pay ransoms. The industry is worried because ransoms have been the only way to quickly and safely free hostages.

The order states it is illegal for anyone to supply financing to any Somalis involved in military activities. Contrary to that, the U.S. Treasury Department said it is not interested in prosecuting anyone trying to free hostages. This understandably puts shipping companies in a tough place.

“Taking away our ability to secure the safe release of our crew members and vessels could put us as an employer and ship owner in a very difficult position,” Moller said. “Thankfully we have not had to test such a scenario under these restrictions and it’s difficult for us to comment further on the consequences of the order without speculating.”

The IMB states that currently, pirates hold 14 vessels and 305 hostages.

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The IMB live piracy map illustrates where pirate attacks have occurred so far this year.

$75 Million Pill Heist at Eli Lilly

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It seems like something out of an action movie starring Steven Segal or Jackie Chan or Bruce Willis or all of the above. This was real life, however, and probably a more interesting story line than any Segal, Chan or Willis flick.

Before dawn on Sunday, thieves scaled the enormous brick building in Enfield, Connecticut where Eli Lilly stores its massive supply of prescription drugs. They cut a hole in the roof and rappelled inside, where they stole approximately $75 million worth of antidepressants and prescription drugs — enough to fill a tractor-trailer. Prescription drugs are a hot target for thieves because of the black market demand for them.

Other pharmaceutical warehouses have been hit with similar burglaries in recent years, but experts said the value of the Eli Lilly heist far eclipses any other prescription-drug thefts they have tracked.

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The thieves could easily net $20 million to $25 million, Gordon said.

Edward Sagebiel, a spokesman for Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly, put the wholesale value of the drugs at million and said they included the antidepressants Prozac and Cymbalta and the anti-psychotic Zyprexa.

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No narcotics or other painkillers were in the warehouse, he said.

Other pharmaceutical warehouses have been hit with similar burglaries in recent years, but experts said the value of the Eli Lilly heist far eclipses any other prescription-drug thefts they have tracked. The thieves could easily net $20 million to $25 million, Gordon said.

The FBI was called in to investigate what will most likely become the biggest pharmaceutical heist in history. What strikes me as strange is that the local police would not confirm whether there are security cameras at the industrial park where the warehouse is located. Considering the fact that, in 2009, thieves stole pharmaceuticals from storage facilities in Virginia, Tennessee and Mississippi, one would think, with this information at hand, pharmaceutical companies would implement better risk management and security measures.

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Global Hacking Scheme Broken Up

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Spanish officials are calling it the world’s biggest network of virus-infected computers. That’s right — 13 million computers were hacked and infected with a program that allowed for the theft of personal and financial data of unwitting citizens worldwide, in what investigators have termed the “Mariposa botnet.”

The culprits? Three Spaniards, ages 31, 30 and 25 who were arrested last week in Spain’s northern Vizcaya province. During a search of their homes and computers, police found personal information from more than 800,000 users.

The suspects “copied personal and financial data of individuals, companies and official institutions in more than 190 countries,” the Civil Guards’ statement said. In addition to gaining illegal access to personal and financial information, the virus would have permitted those controlling the system to mount a large cyberattack from the infected computers, a U.S. official said.

Apparently, the hacking was first detected in May by Defence Intelligence, a Canadian firm that develops software to monitor incoming and outgoing transmissions of every computer on a corporate network.

The botnet [or, a network of computers infected with a virus that can be controlled remotely without owners’ knowledge] included infected machines inside the offices of more than 40 major banks and a vast majority of the top companies on the Fortune 1000 index. Since its creation, Defence Intelligence has identified and helped to protect its customers against dozens of botnets and malicious software programs — with Mariposa botnet being the jewel in its crown.

Authorities are searching for a fourth suspect in this massive cybercrime. “Juan Salon of the Spanish Civil Guard’s cybercrime unit told reporters Wednesday investigators have learned the suspect’s Internet handle and that this person might be Venezuelan.”