Best real "computer crime"?

Question

Are there any real stories about computer crime? I'm talking about stuff like in "Office Space", stealing fractions of pennies a couple of million times... Like that, only actual events. And not Captain Crunch, please, making phone calls for free does not count. No, actual robberies or super smart frauds that depended on computer technology to some extent. Links or books for further reading please.

Answer 1

The Cuckoo's Egg is a classic one.

Answer 2

It depends on your definition of "crime". The Sony Rootkit was certainly borderline, and definitely unethical - but I don't think it was ever prosecuted as a "crime".

-R

Answer 3

I had a co-worker once who was fired for running a prostitution ring out of his office. He kept track of everything in an Excel spreadsheet, but I'm not sure that qualifies it as "computer crime".

Answer 4

Microsoft Access.

Answer 5

One of my favorites was a hack by Kevin Poulsen in which he gained access to the telephone system of a LA radio station and seized all the phone lines to guarantee winning contests by being the 102nd caller. He won a number of items using this hack, including a new Porsche.

Answer 6

Mitnick, was a good one who turned white-hat and now does security consulting.

However, he was more of a social engineer than a "computer criminal" per se.

Answer 7

Votes counted by Diebold machines for the Republican nomination in New Hampshire in 1988. http://www.rense.com/general80/mdro.htm

I am not sure what real is. Was a crime actually committed? I don't know.

Answer 8

Here in Greece we had the Athens Affair during and after Olympics 2004 (wikipedia link).

Athens affair involved the illegal tapping of more than 100 mobile phones on the Vodafone Greece network belonging mostly to members of the Greek government and top-ranking civil servants.

Answer 9

The extortion from virus protection publishers like Norton and McAfee that Microsoft perpetuates.

Answer 10

If there are any that were really good, nobody here will have heard of them :)

There was something really cool I read about a person who was going around DOSing casino websites with his giant botnet. He'd take out their site for a few hours (costing them a few hundred K or so in profits) then he'd send them a letter telling them what he'd done and that he wouldn't take them out for an entire weekend if they paid him a few million (Generalizations are because my memory sucks).

The story was by some guy hired to fight them. He had the weekend from hell--it read almost like a spy novel. He went to vegas where they had some really huge pipes, got the site forwarded through them, added extra routers, there were a bunch of tricks I really didn't get--routing requests through other third parties and filtering there, stuff like that. The attacker tried a lot of different tactics too, most were eventually countered.

The casino did go down enough that they would have saved money if they had just paid the ransom as most others did, but I think they said they considered it a success overall.

Sorry I don't have a link. If anyone knows it, please leave a comment here.

Answer 11

Employee locks entire San Fran WAN would have to rate as one the biggest ones of it's type, i.e.disgruntled employee with high level of IT access.

I'd imagine several readers of SO would have this access but doubt they would be as drastic as this if upset.

Answer 12

How about this case of ONLINE MURDER !

Hard to beat that :)

Answer 13

One of the most intriguing computer crimes I’ve heard was a story about Ron Harris on the History Channel. He was programmer for the Nevada Gaming Control Board (NGCB) who investigated flaws in gaming machines in Las Vegas. He began to turn to the dark side after he saw Larry Volk, a programmer who was going to rat out on the gaming industry, get assassinated before he was able to testify.

Mr. Harris was able to use his position of power to upload trojan horse programs onto the EPROMs of slot machines while he was validating them in accordance with his job at the NGCB. His program would modify the odds for a slot machine only when a certain sequence of coins had been entered into the machine. Ingenious!

After evaluating a random number generator for a Keno game, he determined a flaw in it and exploited this flaw to determine the next numbers selected for Keno in Atlantic City. Unfortunately, his partner in crime was not very good and acted very suspicious after they won the jackpot. Doh!

It is a fascinating story to watch on the History Channel... I think the episode was called 'Slot Busters'.

Answer 14

No citation needed, since it is everywhere in the news. Curiously not mentioned yet, perhaps because we suffer from it daily
One big crime, perpetrated by thousand of people earning lot of money from that, is the spam industry.
A major annoyance for users, which loose countless cumulated hours to sort that out (I got the MyOpenID HTML messages caught by the spam filter of my e-mail provider, for example), and a big financial loss for the network actors, since they count for up to 80% of e-mail traffic, resulting in a sensible consumption of bandwidth and resources.
Not to mention numerous frauds ("we have lot of money in Africa, help us to bring it to Europa/USA") and scams (all health related spams).
And the phishing techniques ("urgent, your PayPal/eBay/Amazon/<whatever big name> account will be closed, click here").

Somehow related, all the trojan industry, manipulating thousands of infected zombie PCs, ready to launch a DoS attack (eg. for blackmail) or just to be used as spam relay.
The infection agent is often spam, or so called e-cards, or "Microsoft" sending to everybody a patch in an attachment (yeah, I believe that... But some people are naive/not knowledgeable).

These are not "best", just a daily menace/annoyance, which can be dangerous noneless.

Answer 15

if we can find detailt writen tchnical evidence of a crime and we would give it to you how big is the change you would want to replicate that.

most storys outthere are real only thing is that the names are incorrect en some details are left to to prevent replication by people who do not understand the technology behind it. the people who do understand are most likely not to use it to commit a crime.

Answer 16

I found The Internet Incident by Ian Probert a very good read a few years back

Answer 17

Illegal file sharing.

Also see Brief History of Computer Crime (PDF) for a lot of summary information and tons of references to more material.

Answer 18

The Salami Slice has few real world notable incidents as it is both hard to detect and not in the interest of the bank/institution to reveal that it has happened.

This mini history of computer crime has a section on it and lists this as having happened as early as the 1970s.

My favourite is this one which has the advantage of not necessarily being illegal :)

Answer 19

"Black Sunday", January 21, 2001 — Satellite television provider DirecTV transmitted an electronic message from its orbiting satellites that destroyed thousands of hacked smart cards, which had been allowing pirates to gain free access to hundreds of channels of programming for four years.

See "From the Eye of a Legal Storm, Murdoch's Satellite-TV Hacker Tells All"