Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Slap on the wrist for Russian Hacker in RBS Case

Unfortunately, the Russian authorities only handed out a suspended sentence for Viktor Pleshchuk, one of the hackers who broke into the systems at RBS WorldPay Inc. They stole approximately $9 million from 2,100 accounts and Viktor essentially got off scot free.

Several inherent problems are revealed in this decision. First, the United States has no extradition treaty with Russia for these types of crimes. Since a large number of attacks originate from Russia, this is something that the State Department should be working as one of the top priorities in Obama's efforts to improve cybersecurity. If we cannot punish the bad guys, all of the reports and committees are of little use. Second, according to the story on Bloomberg, his lawyer's statement that “This is not a regular crime but a cybercrime and Pleshchuk didn’t really have a full understanding of the damage he was causing,” is comical.

These type of criminals hurt thousands of people on a daily basis and need to be severely punished.

2 comments:

  1. Arthur,

    Unfortunately, Russia is still around 50 years back on the following the rules and regulations. Even if the policies and regulation were in place by the time of the trial, unless there is a common interest from both sides involved into the case the bad guys would allays pay of and get free in spite of all the rules international policies and regulations. The reason is CORRUPTION. To change this situation fundamentally we need to think about the solution which will make stealing not cool/profitable, because in Russia a lot of people are still "hungry" for money and in a lot of cases even though they know that they might be punished later they prefer to profit right know. I think the most easy way to make stealing nonprofitable is to cut thief's hands, just joking :-). One of the solution's I can think of is to expose all the private info of the thief (bio, friends, address, phones, emails)to the people he/she took funds from, this should generate a lot of movement to make thief miserable(though it will require another hacker). On the other hand the incident like that definitely make the security stronger in the long run, as there are no progress without failures.

    Thank you,

    Anton

    ReplyDelete
  2. Arthur,

    Unfortunately, Russia is still around 50 years back on the following the rules and regulations. Even if the policies and regulation were in place by the time of the trial, unless there is a common interest from both sides involved into the case the bad guys would allays pay of and get free in spite of all the rules international policies and regulations. The reason is CORRUPTION. To change this situation fundamentally we need to think about the solution which will make stealing not cool/profitable, because in Russia a lot of people are still "hungry" for money and in a lot of cases even though they know that they might be punished later they prefer to profit right know. I think the most easy way to make stealing nonprofitable is to cut thief's hands, just joking :-). One of the solution's I can think of is to expose all the private info of the thief (bio, friends, address, phones, emails)to the people he/she took funds from, this should generate a lot of movement to make thief miserable(though it will require another hacker). On the other hand the incident like that definitely make the security stronger in the long run, as there are no progress without failures.

    Thank you,

    Anton

    ReplyDelete