An ID theft possibly affecting 8,000,000 people has occurred in Europe. Best Western customers who have booked hotel accommodations since 2007 are affected.
In what the UK newspaper the
Sunday Herald has uncovered are the details of a cyber crime with a total loss amount of £2.8 billion possible, this could easily rank as one of the worst cyber crime heists so far by members of trhe Russian mafia.
The Herald reported an Indian hacker was able to place a Trojan vius on a reservation computer which then allowed that hacker to access all of the records from 2007 through the current date of last Friday.
Not only those guests credit card and personal information who had already stayed at the hotel chain were accessed, but also the reservations which are still upcoming.
All of the data has been accessed and most probably sold already through professional crime websites.
"They've pulled off a masterstroke here," said security expert Jacques Erasmus, an ex-hacker who now works for the computer security firm Prevx. "There are plenty of hacked company databases for sale online but the sheer volume and quality of the information that's been stolen in the Best Western raid makes this particularly rare. The Russian gangs who specialise in this kind of work will have been exploiting the information from the moment it became available late on Thursday night. In the wrong hands, there's enough data there to spark a major European crime wave."
Armed with the data, spurious purchases can be made of course through the Russian Mafia's normal channel, but also with the access to those guests with upcoming reservations, the data can be sold to professional burglars who would of course know precisely when the residents would be gone from their homes.
Something of a one-stop burgling pack for sale by the Russian mafia.
The Russian Mafia maintains it's own internet hosting services which are more heavily guarded than most nations Defense industries are. Access to the criminal internet hosting services are limited to those with unimpeachable criminal credentials.
For those who break the code of the Russian Mafia, considerations of retirement accounts are a waste of time.
