American on-line brokers are confronted with the increasing attacks of a new style hackers. Based in Eastern Europe and South Asia, these data-processing pirates do not seek to break down sites, not even to get the banking account numbers. They are satisfied to handle the stock exchange prices. This tactic combines in an astute way usurpation of identity and hacking, according to the Security Exchange Commission (SEC), the American authority of the financial markets monitoring.
In practice, the pirates start by recovering the names of users and the passwords of a certain number of on-line brokers services users, mainly by installing spy software on public access computers (in a library, a hotel...). This software notes all the passwords typed on the computer and sends them by mail to the hacker.
This is a type of extortion in full growth. Once provided with sufficient access to the users' accounts, hackers get connected to the stock exchange sites. There, they sell all the stocks held by their victims, and repurchase different stocks. Generally, they buy "penny stocks", the very low price stocks of poor companies, so as to create the maximum of impact on the course of those stocks.
When the exchange rate is high, the pirates do not have to do anything more but to resell the stocks that they previously bought at low prices and send the profits directly to offshore accounts. The whole operation takes only a few hours, sometimes even a few minutes.
The victims get connected to their accounts in the morning and find themselves in possession of hundreds of stocks of tiny companies about which they never heard, and this hacking type is becoming more and more widespread. The biggest losses were suffered by E-Trade customers. The customers of E-Trade Financial Corp., the fourth larger American on-line stock exchange broker, lost 18 million dollars in this way.
However, the on-line brokers are not protected by the federal insurance systems which the banks are entitled to. There are ten million Americans who bought or sold stocks on-line these last months. The consumers must thus be turned against the on-line brokers themselves to be refunded. And this could quickly threaten the survival of the on-line stock exchange brokers.
Marcus Laval is a senior IT analyst with an experience of more than 20 years, who has written more articles on how to protect against the on-line brokers hackers.
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