History of Banking Frauds and Hacks

Nick Leeson, a senior trader works at Baring Banks in the Singapore office was living a high life in 1992, as he was making over £50k a year. Later that year he used one of the bank’s errored accounts to hide his losses, He then made a series of risky trades and reached losses of $1.4 Billion in 1995. Leeson was charged and found guilty as later was sentenced to 6.5 years of prison. Later that year Baring was sold for £1 for the Dutch bank ING. In 1999, Leeson was starred by Ewan McGregor In in biopic Rougeau trader which was based on Leeson's book in 1996.

The CCB’s server was hacked by some criminals and used it to host phishing sites and steal data from eBay customers. A suspicious email was reported by Netcraft's free phishing toolbar user. The authorities used the email to locate the phishing sites in hidden directories on a server. The server belonged to the Shanghai branch of the China construction bank. In September 2004, Wang Liming and Wang Xiang were executed for their crimes in the Zhengzhou branch.

The Epsilon’s Email system and the names and addresses of around 60 million users were broken into by some attackers. The ultimate goal was to get the user’s card numbers by forcing them and to get other sensitive data. The plan was using a combination of Malware, Phishing, and malicious tactics. That was the biggest breach of data at that time. Epsilon handles over 40 Billion emails for more than 2,200 global brands. About $225 million and $4 billion was lost in the breach.

Mt. Gox's large cryptocurrency exchange was hacked in June 2011. It is believed by the experts that the breach was made from a compromised computer belonging to a company auditor. Alexander Vinnik was the main suspect. Hackers broke into the exchange customer database, which gained them access to very important data like the username and passwords of 60,000 people. This information was used to steal nearly 6% of existed Bitcoin at the time. More than 850,000 Bitcoin were stolen, 750,000 of them were owned by MGBE customers. 5$ million were seized by the government from the MT. Gox bank account, Around 650,000 of the stolen Bitcoin was never recovered.

The FBI and the secret service announced that the network of data processors international, the third-party payment processing company. Was violated by an unknown computer hacker. It isn’t clear how many accounts were compromised. Or if any of that information has been used for fraudulent purposes. About 8 million credit card was stolen. 2.2M cards were issued by MasterCard and 3.4M were issued by Visa.

An outsider installment processor called card framework arrangement inc., affirmed the “security episode”. In an announcement, it is said that a programmer had the option to put pernicious code on its system and access its records. The organization was handling, $15M every year in charge card exchanges and had in any event 100,000 independent companies as customers at the time of the breach. Card framework lost the permit it had with American express and Visa. The rupture influenced 22M Visa card and 14M MasterCard. 40 million charge card was taken.

The know Citigroup has a subsidiary called Citifinancial, however, Citifinancial reported that a box of computer tapes was sent via UPS had been lost. that data only included information on consumers who had taken out loans with Citibank, such as personal loans or debt consolidation loans and that’s according to the firm. The majority of the affected people were Citibank loan customers at that time. About 55,000 of the missings belonged to closed accounts. CitiFinancial auto, CitiFinancial mortgage, and other Citigroup companies were not affected. 3.9 million users lost their data.

The attack started when the internet fraudsters sent an Email to the clients, deceiving them into believing that it came from the bank. The sender encouraged the clients to provide their login information and download a malicious piece of software. Users who downloaded the attacked files were infected by the Trojan virus. More than 365 individual Nordea accounts received payment over 150 Million Euros, equivalent to $171 Million. Nordea banned Bitcoin and has since been caught in a major money laundry scandal. It allegedly received dirty money from two banks in the Baltic.

Jerome Kerviel is a French trader who was convinced in 2008 for causing trading loss, breach of trust, forgery, and the unauthorized use of Societe Generale's computer. Jerome Kerviel has confessed to the fraud, which was worth $7 Billion at the time. Kerviel published a book in May 2010, in which he alleged that his superiors knew of his trading activities and said the practice was very common.

Heartland Payment System a major credit card processor was attacked by a group responsible also for breaching TJX data, a data, an attack that also resulted in other credit card data large thefts. These international criminals were located in several countries. And eventually got caught and one of them was convicted Albert Gonzales was sentenced to 20 years after he confessed to the crime. Albert later withdrew his confession, he claimed that he was at secret services insider during the attack. 130M users lost their personal data. More than $100 million was reimbursed to Visa and Mastercard. The company spent around $140 million to deal with the massive Breach. It cost $3.5 million to settle with American Express, with legal fees amounting to at least $26 million. 130 million users lost their data.

Rescator, a hacker only known by this name stole the login credentials from the HVAC vendor which was working with Target’IT network. He used those credentials to help him gain access to POS terminals and harvest of Target and swiped nearly every card over a several months period. The attacker pilfered 11GB of extremely sensitive data. This resulted in banks spending $350 million reissuing cards. Public findings showed the debacle cost Target more than $252 million in losses. 110 million shoppers lost their credit card data.

It's alleged that an anonymous employee of the Korea Credit Bureau had access to several of the firm's database. This unknown worker managed to steal data for 18 months by secretly copying it onto an external drive. Kb Kookmin Bank, Lotte Card, and Nonghyup were the hardest hit by data theft. Around 40% of the South Korea population was affected by the breach. The fact that the data was unencrypted made it easy to steal. Companies had no idea had been copied until the investigation informed them about the breach. Almost half a million customers applied to have a new credit card issued. About 20 Milion credit card was lost.

According to the bank, customers' contact data were compromised in the attack. The breach affected Chase mobile, Chase.com, and JPMorgan mobile users. Prosecutors allege Andrei Tyurin worked with a team that included Gery Shalon, Samuel Aaron, and Ziv Orenstein. For about two months, the hackers had access to the bank's network without being detected. The attackers used highly sensitive data to perpetrate fraud and stock-manipulation schemes, earning them more than $100 million in dirty money. About 83 million customers, 76 million households, and 7 million businesses were stolen. A total of 166 million users lost their data.

Unknown hackers (possibly the Lazarus group) the fact that hackers managed to break into SWIFT's global money-transfer system was a cause of huge concern. With this data, the hackers had free rein to male withdrawals under the protection of the system, which supposedly employed top-notch security measures. Thankfully, Pan Asia banking canceled the $20 million it had already received from Bangladesh bank, then sent those funds back to Bangladesh bank's New York Fed account. It seems the hackers tried to transfer the money to the Shalika Foundation. However, they misspelled "foundation" as "fandation".

Nirav Modi (Famous designer and jeweler) conspired with employees of the Punjab National Bank to illegally obtain letters of undertaking (LoUs). He then used these LoUs to get short term loans from international offices of other Indian banks. Modi fled India before the scandal broke. At the time of writing, he is still a fugitive. Around 10,000 credit and debit cards belonging to customers of the embattled bank were up for sale on the internet at a shockingly low price of $4-5 percent.