Entries Tagged "crime"

Page 30 of 39

Employee Theft at Australian Mint

You’d think a national mint would have better security against insiders.

But Justice Connolly also criticised security at the mint, saying he was amazed a theft on this scale could happen.

The court heard Grzeskowiac, 48, of the southern Canberra suburb of Monash, simply scooped coins from the production line into his pockets before transferring them to his boots or lunchbox in a toilet cubicle.

Over a 10-month period he walked out with an average of $600 a day.

Justice Connolly expressed astonishment that the mint’s security procedures were so lax.

“I find it hard to believe that 150 coins could be concealed in each boot and a person could still walk through the security system,” he said.

Justice Connolly also said he was amazed the mint could give no indication of just how many coins had actually gone missing.

“I would like to think those working at the other mint factory printing $100 notes might be subject to a better system of security,” he said.

Posted on June 27, 2006 at 7:45 AM • View Comments

$1M VoIP Scam

Lots of details.

The basic service that Pena provided is not uncommon. Telecommunications brokers often buy long-distance minutes from carriers—especially VoIP carriers—and then re-sell those minutes directly to customers. They make money by marking up the services they buy from carriers.

Pena sold minutes to customers, but rather than buy the minutes, he instead decided to hack into the Internet phone company networks, and route calls over those networks surreptitiously, say prosecutors. So he had to pay virtually no costs for providing phone service.

Posted on June 13, 2006 at 2:15 PM • View Comments

Assassins Don't Do Movie Plots, Either

From “Assassination in the United States: An Operational Study of Recent Assassins, Attackers, and Near-Lethal Approachers,” (a 1999 article published in the Journal of Forensic Sciences):

Few attackers or near-lethal approachers possessed the cunning or the bravado of assassins in popular movies or novels. The reality of American assassination is much more mundane, more banal than assassinations depicted on the screen. Neither monsters nor martyrs, recent American assassins, attackers, and near-lethal approachers engaged in pre-incident patterns of thinking and behaviour.

The quote is from the last page. The whole thing is interesting reading.

Posted on June 7, 2006 at 1:15 PM • View Comments

Comments from a Fake ID Salesman

In case you thought a hard-to-forge national ID card would solve the fake ID problem, here’s what the criminals have to say:

Luis Hernandez just laughs as he sells fake driver’s licenses and Social Security cards to illegal immigrants near a park known for shady deals. The joke—to him and others in his line of work—is the government’s promise to put people like him out of business with a tamperproof national ID card.

“One way or another, we’ll always find a way,” said Hernandez, 35, a sidewalk operator who is part of a complex counterfeiting network around MacArthur Park, where authentic-looking IDs are available for as little as $150.

Posted on June 6, 2006 at 6:33 AM • View Comments

Lying to Government Agents

“How to Avoid Going to Jail under 18 U.S.C. Section 1001 for Lying to Government Agents”

Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001 makes it a crime to: 1) knowingly and willfully; 2) make any materially false, fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation; 3) in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative or judicial branch of the United States. Your lie does not even have to be made directly to an employee of the national government as long as it is “within the jurisdiction” of the ever expanding federal bureaucracy. Though the falsehood must be “material” this requirement is met if the statement has the “natural tendency to influence or [is] capable of influencing, the decision of the decisionmaking body to which it is addressed.” United States v. Gaudin, 515 U.S. 506, 510 (1995). (In other words, it is not necessary to show that your particular lie ever really influenced anyone.) Although you must know that your statement is false at the time you make it in order to be guilty of this crime, you do not have to know that lying to the government is a crime or even that the matter you are lying about is “within the jurisdiction” of a government agency. United States v. Yermian, 468 U.S. 63, 69 (1984). For example, if you lie to your employer on your time and attendance records and, unbeknownst to you, he submits your records, along with those of other employees, to the federal government pursuant to some regulatory duty, you could be criminally liable.

Posted on June 5, 2006 at 1:24 PM • View Comments

Counterfeit Electronics as a Terrorist Tool

Winning my award for dumb movie-plot threat of the week, here’s someone who thinks that counterfeit electronics are a terrorist tool:

Counterfeit Electronics as Weapons of Mass Disruption?

Some customers may consider knockoff clothing and watches to be good values, but counterfeit electronics can be devastating. What would happen, then, if some criminal element bent on wreaking havoc and inducing public panic were to intentionally introduce such a bogus product into the electronics supply chain—malfunctioning printed-circuit boards in a critical air-traffic-control system, say, or faulty parts into automobile braking systems? Even the suggestion that such an act had occurred might set off a wave of recalls and might ground suspect systems.

Gadzooks.

EDITED TO ADD (6/2): Here’s another article:

“Many attacks of this kind would have two components. One would alter the process control system to produce a defective product. The other would alter the quality control system so that the defect wouldn’t easily be detected,” Borg says. “Imagine, say, a life-saving drug being produced and distributed with the wrong level of active ingredients. This could gradually result in large numbers of deaths or disabilities. Yet it might take months before someone figured out what was going on.” The result, he says, would be panic, people afraid to visit hospitals and health services facing huge lawsuits.

Deadly scenarios could occur in industry, too. Online outlaws might change key specifications at a car factory, Borg says, causing a car to “burst into flames after it had been driven for a certain number of weeks”. Apart from people being injured or killed, the car maker would collapse. “People would stop buying cars.” A few such attacks, run simultaneously, would send economies crashing. Populations would be in turmoil. At the click of a mouse, the terrorists would have won.

Posted on May 24, 2006 at 11:57 AM • View Comments

Thief Disguises Himself as Security Guard

Another in our series on the security problems of trusting people in uniform:

A thief disguised as a security guard Tuesday duped the unsuspecting staff of a top Italian art gallery into giving him more than 200,000 euros ($253,100), local media reported.

The thief showed up Tuesday morning at the Pitti Palace, a grandiose renaissance construction in central Florence and one of Italy’s best known museums, wearing the same uniform used by employees of the security firm which every day collects the institution’s takings.

After the cashier staff gave him three bags full of money, he signed a receipt and calmly walked out.

Posted on May 12, 2006 at 6:10 AM • View Comments

Shell Suspends Chip & Pin in the UK

According to the BBC:

Petrol giant Shell has suspended chip-and-pin payments in 600 UK petrol stations after more than £1m was siphoned out of customers’ accounts.

This is just sad:

“These Pin pads are supposed to be tamper resistant, they are supposed to shut down, so that has obviously failed,” said Apacs spokeswoman Sandra Quinn.

She said Apacs was confident the problem was specific to Shell and not a systemic issue.

A Shell spokeswoman said: “Shell’s chip-and-pin solution is fully accredited and complies with all relevant industry standards.

That spokesperson simply can’t conceive of the fact that those “relevant industry standards” were written by those trying to sell the technology, and might possibly not be enough to ensure security.

And this is just after APACS (that’s the Association of Payment Clearing Services, by the way) reported that chip-and-pin technology reduced fraud by 13%.

Good commentary here. See also this article. Here’s a chip-and-pin FAQ from February.

EDITED TO ADD (5/8): Arrests have been made. And details emerge:

The scam works by criminals implanting devices into chip and pin machines which can copy a bank card’s magnetic strip and record a person’s pin number.

The device cannot copy the chip, which means any fake card can only be used in machines where chip and pin is not implemented – often abroad.

This is a common attack, one that I talk about in Beyond Fear: falling back to a less secure system. The attackers made use of the fact that there is a less secure system that is running parallel to the chip-and-pin system. Clever.

Posted on May 8, 2006 at 12:41 PM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.