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An Impriso

 

ned Hacker Invented an ATM Attachment That Stops Skimmers

 

Valentin Boanta has a lot of free time on his hands—five years worth, to be exact. That's because Boanta is currently serving a prison sentence for, according to Reuters, "supplying gadgets to an organized crime gang used to conceal ATM skimmers." So with all that time to think about what he's done, the apparently penitent prisoner spent six months developing an ATM add-on to prevent the exact crime that put him there in the first place.

The device, which Boanta calls the Secure Revolving System (SRS), can attach to any current ATM machine and change the way it reads your card, preventing those pesky, increasingly discreet skimmers form stealing your info. Current skimming devices work by reading the card's magnetic tape lengthwise and in a sequential order. But as the above video demonstrates, the SRS requires you to insert your card widthwise before rotating it to be inserted into the ATM, making any attached Skimmer effectively useless.

Ministry of Defense Satellite Hacked (February 1999)

A small group of hackers traced to southern England gained control of a MoD Skynet military satellite and signaled a security intrusion characterized by officials as "information warfare," in which an enemy attacks by disrupting military communications. In the end, the hackers managed to reprogram the control system before being discovered. Though Scotland Yard's Computer Crimes Unit and the U.S. Air Force worked together to investigate the case, no arrests have been made. 

 

 

 

 

• 2012 Cost of Cyber Crime Study: UK

 

Posted:

May 22,2013

Published:

Oct 25, 2012

Format:

PDF

Type:

Research Content

Language:

English

•  

  Sponsored by: ComputerWeekly.comThe 2012 Cost of Cyber Crime Study: United Kingdom is independently conducted by Ponemon Institute. The benchmark study, sponsored by HP Enterprise Security is based on a representative sample of 38 organisations in various industry sectors.
  
  Cyber attacks generally refer to criminal activity conducted via the Internet. These attacks can include stealing an organisation’s intellectual property, confiscating online bank accounts, creating and distributing viruses on other computers, posting confidential business information on the Internet and disrupting a country’s critical national infrastructure.
  
  Disruption to business processes and revenue losses create the highest costs for organisations following a cyber attack.
  
  Key takeaways from this report include:
  
  
  • Cyber crimes are costly. We found that the average annualised cost of cyber crime for the 38 organisations in our study is £2.1 million per year, with a range of £.4 million to £7.7 million.
  
  
  • Cyber attacks have become common occurrences. The companies in our study experienced 41 successful attacks per week or 1.1 successful attacks per organisation per week.
  
  
  • The most costly cyber crimes are those caused by malicious insiders, denial of services, and malicious code. Mitigation of such attacks requires enabling technologies such as SIEM, intrusion prevention systems, application security testing and enterprise governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) solutions.
  
  Click on the button to download this report
  
  
  

  Ponemon Institute is dedicated to independent research and education that advances responsible information and privacy management practices within business and government. Our mission is to conduct high quality, empirical studies on critical issues affecting the management and security of sensitive information about people and organisations

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