Professor Leading a Pupils’ Group Assists in Busting Online Hackers

A cyber-criminals' syndicate from Eastern Europe lately got exposed and arrested when Gary Warner, professor of computer-forensics at the University of Alabama together with his students indirectly helped through an experimental investigation. Criminaljusticedegreeschools.com published this on March 25, 2012.

Operation Trident, name of the busting maneuver, had the role of Prof. Warner ever-since he started associating with InfraGard, an assembly of 50,000 experts on cyber-crime that kept watch over the digital infrastructure of and within the country.

Actually according to Warner, he found a Trojan that stole data from the contaminated PCs and which ill-intended people utilized for garnering banking data saved at SMBs (small-and-medium sized businesses) in USA. The data subsequently helped pilfer money through middlemen or "money-mules," which operated inside USA.

Indeed, Warner himself employed complicated methods of data-harvesting with which he managed in connecting the contaminated PCs followed with finding their country-of-origin, which was Ukraine. The revelation evidently helped the Federal Bureau of Investigation to catch numerous of the computer-attackers along with their mules. Over $70m was involved in the scam, with 18 mules based in America.

Warner stated that his pupils employed the methods they'd learnt, while researching on cyber-crime, so they started swarming VKontakte (Russian equivalence of Facebook) and Facebook profiles followed with fast detecting most of them that belonged to the mules. Rockcenter.msnbc.msn.com published this on March 21, 2012.

The pupils' experiment revealed that one pupil who'd become a mule blatantly put up photos of herself on the Net and bundled them with a $100-bill each. Still one more student published an image of himself wearing a top labeled, "I (Love) New York," having his arms raised, and enjoying a party-of-friends in a pub, with a few who were the remaining money-mules.

Meanwhile, during one recent Federal Office Systems Exposition (FOSE) conference, the FBI admitted how social-networking websites played a role. The bureau as well discussed a few basic lessons of Operation Trident along with the present anti-cyber crime initiative of agencies of law-enforcement. Apparently, the operation's success included social media's role in tracing suspects, the steady increase in the cooperation of global law-enforcements, and more, the participants summarized.

Related article: Privacy And Data Protection Critical To Future Success

» SPAMfighter News - 4/2/2012