4 Hackers Indicted in $9.5 Million Bank Card Attack: Via Threat Level.

Four men have been indicted in Georgia on charges that they hacked into the Atlanta-based bank card processing company RBS WorldPay. They allegedly used an army of flunkies to steal $9.5 million in cash from ATM machines around the world in a span of hours.

Sergei Tsurikov, 25, of Tallinn, Estonia; Viktor Pleshchuk, 28, of St. Petersburg, Russia; Oleg Covelin, 28, of Chisinau, Moldova; and a fourth person identified only as “Hacker 3″ were indicted by a federal grand jury in what’s being described as “perhaps the most sophisticated and organized computer fraud attack ever conducted.”

The hack involved reverse-engineering PINs for payroll debit card accounts — the holy grail of bank card hacking. Another four people based in Estonia were also indicted on access-device fraud charges in connection with the hack. [ Read more ... ]

'Cyberwar' and Estonia's Panic Attack: If you flip towards the back of this month's Wired magazine (15.09) you'll find an earnest two-page graphic depicting IP packets blasting off like ICBMs from Asia, arcing in a polar trajectory and slamming into six defenseless U.S. cities.

Yes, our friends across the hall from Wired News have succumbed to the sweet siren call of the cyberwar story. And they want you to know that It Could Happen Here.

Writer Joshua Davis was dispatched to the smoking ruins of Estonia to assess the damage wrought by last spring's DDoS attacks against the country's web, e-mail and DNS servers. Josh is a talented writer, and he returned with a story that offers some genuine insights -- a few, though, are likely unintentional. [ Read more ... ]