📸

terminal they had previously discovered. They took turns sitting on the terminal, collecting the transmissions and returning the correct acknowledgements with the Federal Reserve IDs. The transmissions each represented a cash transfer: essentially these were being hijacked. But by sending the required acknowledgements the hackers were giving the bank 'confirmation' that the transactions had reached the destination banks. By noon the two had $184,300 in their limbo account.

The two then turned off 'data forwarding' on the target's computer, taking control of the EFT machine themselves to redistribute the captured funds. By altering the transmissions, they transferred the money to the Swiss account. To the Swiss, it looked like a normal transmission; after all, it had come through the bank's own EFT computer.

After the two hackers received the standard confirmation from the Swiss bank they immediately filled out six withdrawal forms and faxed them to its New York branch, along with instructions detailing where the funds should be sent. They told the Swiss bank to send $7,333 to each of the six US accounts. (The amount was picked to be below the sum requiring notification to the authorities.) They followed the same procedure for three days, leaving the Swiss account with a little over $52,000 remaining on deposit.

Over the next week they withdrew $22,000 from each of the Dallas and Houston banks in tranches of $5,000 per day, leaving just under $1,000 in each account. At the end of the week each took home $66,000 in cash.

You can believe that story or not as you wish. Certainly the bank in question doesn't believe a word of it; it has consistently denied that anything resembling these events ever happened, or that it has lost money in an EFT transfer due to hacking. The only reason anyone knows about the incident (or non-incident) is that the two hackers who did it - or say they did - posted the details on a pirate board called Black ICE. The board was used by the Legion of Doom, at the time the most proficient and experienced hacker gang in the US. The two hackers-cum-robbers are thought, from references in their account, to be LoD members - or at least to consider themselves LoD members.

📸