UK police count 8,500 victims in data theft
Published October 26th, 2006
British electronic-crime detectives are investigating a massive data theft operation that stole sensitive information from 8,500 people in the UK and others in some 60 countries, say officials.
In total, cybercriminals targeted 600 financial companies and banks, according to UK authorities, who have worked over the past week to identify and notify victims.
Through intelligence sources, UK police were given several gigabytes of data — around 130,00 files — that came from a server in the US, says Charlie McMurdie, detective chief inspector for the Specialist Crime Directorate e-Crime Unit of the London Metropolitan Police. Most of the data related to financial information, she says.
The data was collected by a malicious software program nicknamed Haxdoor that infected victims’ computers. Some 2,300 machines were located in the UK, McMurdie says.
Haxdoor is a powerful program that can collect passwords and send them to another email address plus disable a computer’s firewall, among other functions, according to a description posted on security vendor F-Secure’s website. Symantec writes it first detected Haxdoor in November 2003.
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