Romanian Hackers Infiltrating the US Pharma Firms Arrested

The Directorate for Fighting Electronic Crime in Romania jointly with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and prosecutors of Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT, Romania) fear that five hackers belonging to Romania and between the age of 20 and 32 years were operating as a group.

Accordingly, the Romanian authorities have arrested the suspects for infiltrating the computer networks of a number of US pharmaceutical firms and monitoring data of credit card dealings. The infiltration has caused damage of US$ 800,000.

The police officials have stated that the method employed by cyber criminals was very simple. They planted a keylogging program on the firms' computers that worked as a spyware to monitor and trace every activity occurring on the systems.

Moreover, DIICOT reports that the criminals also acquired access through the legal remote administration mechanism used by the firms; thereby, enabling themselves to tap all the data of credit cards.

Furthermore, according to police reports, authorities caught the suspects on April 9, 2009 when officials raided 7 locations in Bucharest (Romania) that were the residential places of the suspects.

The police also disclosed that 2 desktop PCs, 5 hard-disk drives, 9 laptops, memory cards and CDs were seized from the criminals that would help in forensic investigation so as to establish the cyber crime.

Additionally, it is said that after the arrests, two among the five suspects were detained temporarily for 29 days, while the remaining three were released after 24 hours. Nevertheless, all the suspects are accused under the Romanian law of illegally accessing a PC and tapping its data, carrying out fraudulent financial activity by using the electronic payment processes, and for committing money laundering, officials investigating into the incident said.

In the meantime, it is worth noted that the Romanian online crooks have been in the news recently. Approximately 20 international phishing scammers were caught in March 2009 because they stole sensitive credentials and made a huge amount of money. Also, in the 1st week of April 2009, a man from Romania was considered as the first phisher internationally who faced a sentence in the US.

Related article: Romanian Hacker Haunting ebay

» SPAMfighter News - 4/23/2009