Dan Goodin reports:
Credit card fraudsters may have pocketed as much as $500,000 over the past month by pursuing a new type of attack that exploits a major blind spot in payment processors’ defenses, an analyst said.
The “flash attacks” recruit hundreds of money mules who go to ATMs throughout the US and almost simultaneously withdraw relatively small sums of money from a single compromised account, according to Avivah Litan, vice president at market research firm Gartner, who follows the credit card industry. They then move on to a new account. At the end of the month, the heists can fetch as much as $500,000.
“The resulting cash transactions fly under the radar of existing fraud detection systems — they are typically small amounts that don’t raise any alarms,” Litan blogged on Tuesday.
Read more in The Register.