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 Man arrested as a suspect in a phishing scam
April 5, 2005
Estonian man has been arrested on allegations of stealing millions of dollars from people all across Europe.
Police of a small state located on the shores of Baltic Sea believe that the suspect has plundered hundreds of banking accounts as a result of his successful deployment of an unidentified Trojan registering victims' keystrokes and communicating them back to the offender. The man, an unidentified Estonia resident, is charged with creating a mass-mailing email that, as it's common with a phishing technique, purported to come from well-established companies and government organizations and lured the unsuspecting users to a maliciously constructed web site that contained a Trojan.
Once arriving at that site, people got infected with a powerful Trojan and a keylogger program that recorded victims' key press sequences when they were accessing their online accounts.
The con used social engineering ploy to make the incoming email look more "sexy" by creating messages that contained job offers recipients were tempted to click on.
Investigators reckon that residents of at least Germany, Britain, Spain and Baltic countries might have been affected.
Aivar Pau, a spokesman for Estonia's central criminal police, said last week's arrest followed a year long investigation into what he described as the biggest case of online banking theft in Estonian history. The man faces fraud charges and up to five years imprisonment.
Estonian police were helped in their investigation by the Hansabank specialists, as well from their Latvian and Lithuanian counterparts. Jaan Priisalu, an IT risk manager at Hansabank, told that the Trojan used in a scam was the most sophisticated he'd ever seen.
"The last 12 months have seen a dramatic rise in the number of new viruses, worms and Trojan horses designed to steal the keystrokes of innocent computer users. Our labs analyze approximately 15 new pieces of malware which include this payload every day, compared to only five a day this time last year," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security software company Sophos.
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