Computer Crime Research Center

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Cyber blackmail or a terrorist act

Date: May 31, 2004
Source: Computer Crime Research Center
By: Ludmila Goroshko

Only when some years passed we can review without bias events that happened in Ukraine in January 2002.

In order to get one million of UAH (about $185-190 thousand) persons unknown phoned director of Odessa Airport, Ukraine and informed that they placed an explosive device on board of a plane bound for Vienna and also they blew up a bomb in the building opposite to airport building to confirm the severity of their intentions.

Security Service of Ukraine and Air Security Office were informed of the accident right away. Criminals placed detailed instructions on fulfilment of their requirements on the Internet. The main demand was one million of UAH. Criminals planned to use Privatbank's system of Internet payments "Privat-24" to get the money. One of the features useful for criminals in that case was that this system allows creating an account and controlling it anonymously knowing only login and password. Therefore they used IT to secure anonymous and remote notification of threats and getting money.

Besides typical operational measures taken there was a need to operationally establish data on technical information in computer networks as criminals used the Internet at all stages of their criminal offence. Security Service decided to engage experts of a unit fighting crimes in the sphere of high technologies at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, they were committed to establish persons that sent e-mails with threats and the initiators of bank payments.

Response of the ISP, Internet services of which were used by criminals to send e-mails with threats helped to determine phone numbers and addresses related to criminals, and also allowed to get definite evidential information stored in log data bases of ISP and Privatbank.

Logs allowed to find out IP addresses of computers, e-mails and phones that helped to review concrete computers at the scenes.

The chronicle of events evidences that timely and qualified aid, provided by the unit fighting crimes in the sphere of high technologies at the Ministry of Internal Affairs in January 2002, to officers of departments fighting terrorist and protecting state organization at Security Service allowed to reveal a criminal group, to prevent their criminal activity, and thus cyber terrorists got due.


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2004-06-01 02:45:48 - I cant wait for the English version to be... pf22-alpha
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