Operation High Roller
CSIA 301
November 23, 2014

New forms of cyber crime continue to come up all the time. Technology has aided the theft of money from bank accounts from banks from all over the world and one such cyber attack was Operation High Roller a cyber attack that targeted corporate bank accounts. According to The Wall Street Journal, these attacks which began in Europe spread to Latin America and even the United States (Booker 2012). The attackers did fraudulent transfer of money from accounts belonging to financial institutions. For instance, in the United States, the victims of the attack were companies whose commercial accounts had a minimum of several million dollars. The attackers sent SpyEye and Zeus software to hack computers that were infected with malware. This cyber attack has an extensive network and automation which interacts with serves that are used by their target victims. But much of the transactions are carried out in the servers used by the criminals.
Two security firms, McAFee and Gurdian Analytic (Business Insider) were behind this discovery and they realized that there was no human participation required in the transactions. All the criminals needed were insider understanding of the goings on in the banking industry transaction systems. They then developed commercial and custom codes which they maliciously used to siphon millions of dollars into their virtual accounts. About sixty serves were identified as the ones used in making attempted robberies from some very high value accounts belonging to super rich persons, credit unions as well as regional banks (Guardian Analytics 3). These criminals have gone hi- tech such that all they do is sit behind computers and siphon millions of dollars into their accounts without eliciting any form of suspicion from the involved banks.
According to MacFee, Operation High Roller injected