Hackers Steal Over $19,000 Out of a Salem County Bank Account

Computer-hackers reportedly infiltrated an online bank account at Salem County holding around $13m to steal about $19,000 via executing unauthorized wire-transfers, published nj.com dated January 22, 2012.

Actually during December 2011, the theft occurred when the ZeuS bank information-capturing Trojan swiped the login credentials to access the Microsoft Exchange server that was linked with the administrative operations pertaining to the hacked account.

However, according to Douglas C. Wright Chief Finance Officer of Salem County, the county has taken help from the law enforcement agency that's certain the PC-virus namely ZeuS Bot attacked the county machine. Nj.com published this.

Precisely $19,380.70 was moved out the account of Salem County via Fulton Bank and credited to a JP Morgan Chase account in California, while the County authorities were barred from accessing the key financial institution account for sometime. Meanwhile, considering that there was $13m in total funds inside the account, there might've been a higher scale of theft, county authorities said. TechWorld reported this on January 23, 2012.

Significantly Prevx Security's data shows that a Trojan virus, which facilitated computer-hackers to acquire admission into the Salem County account, allegedly hijacked more than 74,000 accounts of organizations like NASA, Oracle, Cisco, Monster.com, BusinessWeek, Amazon, Play.com, ABC and Bank of America.

These hackers managed towards getting hold of the Internet-banking system of the County via MS Exchange system. As of Wright's analysis, they effectively pounced into the county account and locked out any access to the main account. Thereafter, by logging into the target account, the hackers transmitted the sum, Wright added.

Consequently, officials reported that future attacks would be prevented via the utilization of a computer at the accounts division that'd be separated from the Internet, and disallow e-mail or detachable devices for carrying out Internet transactions. Further, one fresh secure PC would be installed at the county, just to conduct bank transactions, that too would be without Internet connection, e-mail, and USB ports/disk drive.

The system, according to Wright, would start functioning within a week. Meanwhile, the County, in collaboration with its insurance broker and Fulton Bank, is working to determine one method for retrieving the stolen money.

Related article: Hackers Redirect Windows Live Search to Malicious Sites

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