One Ukrainian and 4 Russians have been charged by a US court for stealing more than 160 million numbers of credit cards and the court has also stated that this activity has inflicted losses which amount of hundreds of millions of dollars. Some big corporations are included in the ones that have been on the receiving end of this loss.
The five individuals have been accused of running a large hacking organization which through their activities has penetrated into the computer of many international and American corporations in the span of seven years. Sources have revealed that these corporations are more than 12 in number.
These indictments have been announced last Thursday by a US attorney in Newark and the attorney has also termed it as the biggest data and hacking breach scheme that has ever been prosecuted in the USA.
The attorney behind this prosecution, Paul Fishman has given a statement that the ‘’Dumps’’ which have been acquired by these hackers amount more than 160m debit and credit cards numbers. The indictments have revealed that the data stolen by this group was being sold to what are termed as ‘’Dumps re-sellers’’. These dump re-sellers sold this data to organizations and individuals partly via online forums.
The individuals which are termed as ‘’Cashers’’ utilized this data and encoded it onto blank cards and then they went to cash out their desired values. The debit cards were utilized to withdraw money directly from various ATMs and the fake credit card using the stolen data were used to carry out different purchases.
Various consumers, financial institutions and different credit card corporations have faced losses of millions and it is in addition to the huge loss of more than 300 million dollars which has been faced by three major corporate victims. The companies which have been the target of this hacking assault are Visa Inc., NASDAQ, Heartland payment systems Inc., and the list also includes Carrefour SA (CA) which is the biggest retailer in France.
The people who have been alleged as hackers, in this case, are namely Vladimir Drinkman, Syktyvkar, Aleksandr Kalinin, Roman Kotov, Dmitry Smilianets and a Ukrainian named Mikhail Rytikov. All these personnel are either businessmen or high ranking officials in different companies.
Kalanin and Drinkman have been identified as the sophisticated hackers who have been involved in the hacking of various payment processors, companies and banks, while Kotov has been identified as the one that was harvesting the data that was hacked. Rytikov has been identified as the person who has been providing website hosting services with regards to the hacking operation.
The USA prosecution has also stated that Smilianets was working as the group’s information salesman.
The five members have been accused of participating in this huge hacking operation while the 4 Russian members among these 5 have also been charged for multiple attempts of gaining unauthorized access of computers along with wire fraud.
Some of the co-conspirators that have been un-indicted have also been reveled in the court and it includes Albert Gonzalez who is from Miami and who has already been sentenced prison of about 20 years on being found guilty of stealing millions of debit and credit card records. The case on Gonzalez has been built by the prosecution and this means that two concurrent sentences will be served on him.
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