Arrests made in Sumitomo case!

Opinion

Mar 18, 20081 min

After almost four years there is finally news regarding the now famous break in at Sumitomo Mitsui bank branch in London. The “Serious Organised Crime Agency” (as opposed to non-serious organized crime) has arrested and charge four UK men including a Lord of perpretating the cyber heist at Sumitomo in October of 2004. You will remember that the bank robbers infiltrated the bank posing as cleaning staff and installed hardware key stroke loggers on PCs. They then used information they gained on SWIFT operations to transfer 220 million pounds to ten different accounts around the world.

At the time there were no reports of arrests except for one guy in Israel. Maybe Google news is not the best research tool but I have been tracking this since the first announcement and this is the first news in three and a half years. I hope we learn more as this case develops. There are lessons to be learned from the Sumitomo case that other banks around the world should be paying attention too.

Security

by Richard Stiennon

Contributor

Richard Stiennon is chief research analyst at IT-Harvest, the firm he founded in 2005 to cover the 1,600 vendors that make up the IT security industry. He is the author of Surviving Cyberwar (Government Institutes, 2010) and There Will Be Cyberwar: How the Move to Network-Centric Warfighting Set the Stage for Cyberwar. He is a member of the advisory board at the Information Governance Initiative and principal of TrueBit Cyber Partners. He also serves on the R2-TAC, the technical advisory committee for the Responsible Recycling standard for e-waste.

Stiennon was chief marketing officer for Fortinet Inc. and vice president of threat research at Webroot Software. Prior to that, he was vice president of research at Gartner Inc. He has a B.S. in aerospace engineering and an M.A. in war in the modern world from King’s College, London.

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of Richard Stiennon and do not necessarily represent those of IDG Communications Inc. or its parent, subsidiary or affiliated companies.