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HACKING FOR PROFIT

Hackers are generally boastful. They gain credibility by exaggerating their abilities, by glamorizing their exploits. It's the old identity thing again: just as meek little Harvey Merkelstein from Brooklyn becomes the fearsome Killer Hacker when he gets loose on a keyboard, he also gains points with his peers by topping everyone else's last hack. Robbing a bank is a pretty good hack.

The report from the two hackers could have been a fantasy, a means of impressing other LoD members. Equally, if they had managed to pull it off, they still would have wanted to boast about it. And the perfect crime is the one that even the victim doesn't realize has happened. In the report posted on Black ICE, one of the two 'bank robbers' wrote:

It will be interesting to see how the [target's bank] Internal Fraud Auditors and the Treasury Department sort this out. There are no traces of the diversion, it just seems to have happened. [The bank] has printed proof that the funds were sent to the correct banks, and the correct banks' acknowledgement on the same printout. The correct destination banks, however, have no record of the transaction. There is record of [the bank] sending funds to our Swiss account, but only the Swiss have those records. Since we were controlling the host [the EFT computer] when the transactions were sent, there were no printouts on the sending side. Since we were not actually at a terminal connected to one of their line printers, no one should figure out to start contacting Swiss banks, and since [the bank] does this sort of thing daily with large European banks, they will be all twisted and confused by the time they find ours. Should they even get to our bank, they will then have to start the long and tedious process of extracting information from the Swiss. Then if they get the Swiss to cooperate, they will have a dead-end with the account, since it was set up under the guise of a non-entity. The accounts in Dallas and Houston were also in fake names with fake Social Security Numbers; we even changed our appearances and handwriting styles at each bank.

I'm glad I'm not the one who will have the job of tracking me down, or even trying to muster up proof of what happened. Now we won't have to worry about disposable income for awhile. I can

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