By Iain S Bruce

AN international criminal gang has pulled off one of the most audacious cyber-crimes ever and stolen the identities of an estimated eight million people in a hacking raid that could ultimately net more than GBP2.8billion in illegal funds.

A Sunday Herald investigation has discovered that late on Thursday night, a previously unknown Indian hacker successfully breached the IT defences of the Best Western Hotel group's online booking system and sold details of how to access it through an underground network operated by the Russian mafia.

It is a move that has been dubbed the greatest cyber-heist in world history. The attack scooped up the personal details of every single customer that has booked into one of Best Western's 1312 continental hotels since 2007.

Amounting to a complete identitytheft kit, the stolen data includes a range of private information including home addresses, telephone numbers, credit card details and place of employment.

"They've pulled off a masterstroke here, " said security expert Jacques Erasmus, an ex-hacker who now works for the computer security firm Prevx.

"There are plenty of hacked company databases for sale online but the sheer volume and quality of the information that's been stolen in the Best Western raid makes this particularly rare. The Russian gangs who specialise in this kind of work will have been exploiting the information from the moment it became available late on Thursday night. In the wrong hands, there's enough data there to spark a major European crime wave."

Although the security breach was closed on Friday after Best Western was alerted by the Sunday Herald, experts fear that information seized in the raid is already being used to pursue a range of criminal strategies.

These include:

Armed with the numbers and expiry dates of customers' credit cards, fraudsters are equipped to make multiple high-value purchases in their victims' names before selling on the goods.

Bundled together with home addresses and other personal details, the stolen data can be used by professional organised criminal gangs which specialise in identity theft to apply for loans, cards and credit agreements in the victims' names.

Because the compromised information included future bookings, the gang now has the capacity to sift through the data and sell "burglary packs", giving the home addresses of local victims and the dates on which they are expected to be away from their home.

Although the nature of internet crime makes it difficult to track the precise details of the raid, the Sunday Herald understands that a hacker from India - new to cyber-crime - succeeded in bypassing the security software and placing a Trojan virus on one of the Best Western Hotel machines used for reservations. The next time a staff member logged in, her username and password were collected and stored.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 10:01

n a case that could tie the hands of companies trying to protect their customers from internet threats, a website owner with past ties to a notorious piece of spyware has filed a lawsuit claiming it is being unfairly maligned by warnings from McAfee that the site poses a risk to its customers.

7Search.com filed the complaint in US District Court in Illinois. It seeks unspecified monetary damages and an injunction ordering McAfee's SiteAdvisor service to designate the site as safe. SiteAdvisor, which warns users when they are about to visit a site that may pose security threats, currently displays a warning that reads: "Feedback from credible users suggests that downloads on this site may contain what some people would consider adware, spyware, or other potentially unwanted programs."

7Search.com insists there are no software downloads available whatsoever on its site and argues the warning amounts to a willful attempt to injure a legitimate business.

"Customers of 7Search who have opened accounts with 7Search.com have later terminated that business relationship as a result of seeing McAfee's false, deceptive, confusing and/or misleading statements and representations about 7Search.com," the complaint contends.

7Search was the site that once upon a time offered the much reviled 7FaSST Search Toolbar, which according to analyses such as this was a purported browser accelerator program that in some cases used ActiveX to forcibly install itself on users' PCs. Once there, it logged detailed information about user's browsing habits.

In its complaint, 7Search says that "Since at least 2003 there have been no direct downloads available on the 7Search.com site."

What the complaint doesn't say is that people who own 7Search.com have ties to browseraccelerator.com, a site that pushes a browser toolbar that "helps users improve their online experience dramatically by displaying within a browser everything an informed consumer needs to know about the web site being visited."

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 14:56

McKinnon had applied to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) for it to hear an appeal against his extradition. Under 'Rule 39', citizens can make an emergency application to halt extradition proceedings if they believe their human rights will be infringed upon.

McKinnon's legal team on Thursday sent out a statement saying his application had been denied. "Today the European Court of Human Rights ruled against Mr McKinnon's application for Rule 39 Interim Relief," the lawyers said on the statement.

Two weeks ago, McKinnon's legal team submitted his application to the ECHR. Under the terms of the application, the UK government could not extradite McKinnon. This legal block has now been lifted

"The temporary prohibition of our client's extradition as granted by the ECHR on 12 August is now effectively lifted and the authorities of the United Kingdom are now free to extradite our client to the United States," the legal team said in the statement.

Karen Todner, McKinnon's solicitor, told ZDNet.co.uk on Thursday that McKinnon had run out of legal-challenge options. "In terms of legal challenges and court proceedings, we've gone as far as we can," Todner said.

However, Gary McKinnon has recently been diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. Todner said she had written to home secretary Jacqui Smith asking that McKinnon be tried in the UK on medical grounds.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 14:56

For many, the term “back to school” still implies re-connecting with friends who disappeared at the end of June into remote summer camps, family retreats or full-time jobs that limited communication until after Labor Day, when classes restarted.


(For others, the term likely recalls Thornton Mellon’s Triple Lindy into a Grand Lakes University pool in a 1986 film starring Rodney Dangerfield.)

But “remote” isn’t what it used to be, not even for second-graders, to whom computer use, e-mail and even social networking sites are often familiar technologies – even more familiar than their own parents.

During an interview today, one expert from a Montreal-based provider of value-added service solutions for Internet service providers, told TMCnet that there are three things that the ISPs should do in the Web security space to ensure that children and families are protected from threats such as identity theft, making unwanted contact with strangers or visiting age-appropriate Web sites such as those dealing with adult entertainment or gambling.

Posted by Justin Payton in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 13:56