Up to a 100 banks across the world have been the target of a hacker group called Carbanak that managed to trick, hack and circumvent banking software and get away with $1 billion.

Thankfully, South Africans don’t need to fear that their bank has been breached because as it turns out, the only African financial institution that was hacked is in Morocco.

Global anti-virus and online security company Kaspersky Lab started to covertly investigate the group after a Ukrainian bank asked for help after cash was being mysteriously stolen from ATMs. The ATM glitch was originally dismissed as simple and unsophisticated malware – until it started to spread.

“Little did we know then that a few months later one of our colleagues would receive a call at 3 a.m. in the middle of the night. On the phone was an account manager, asking us to call a certain number as matter of urgency. The person at the end of the line was the CSO of a Russian bank. One of their systems was alerting that data was being sent from their Domain Controller to the People’s Republic of China,” Kaspersky Lab explained in a statement.

Carbanak used different techniques to breach different banks, but he/she/it primarily monitored user behaviour using infected computers that recorded videos, and hacked systems using data gathered through keylogger software. The hacker group also made use of spear phishing emails with malicious attachments, and sent the mails to bank staff – a fairly simple technique.

The cash-out processes from each bank was rather low-key, as it simply intercepted a bank clerk’s screen and paid out the money to whatever account it wanted.

Since the spree started in 2013, the average loss per bank is between $2.5 million and $10 million, with each bank robbery taking about 3 months to complete.

“This is, by far, the most successful criminal cyber campaign we have ever seen,” Kaspersky Lab concluded.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ez9LNudxRIU

[Source – Kaspersky Lab, Image – Shutterstock]