Wife bans FBI head from online banking
Robert Mueller
(Credit: James Martin/CNET)SAN FRANCISCO--No one is immune from cyberthreats, not even the head of the FBI.
FBI Director Robert Mueller was banned by his wife from doing online banking after he nearly fell for a phishing scam, he said on Wednesday during a talk at the Commonwealth Club of California.
He received an e-mail purporting to be from his bank that looked "perfectly legitimate" and which prompted him to verify some information. He started to follow the instructions but then realized that that "might not be such a good idea," he said.
"Just a few clicks away from falling into a classic Internet phishing scam," Mueller "barely caught himself in time" and admitted he "definitely should have known better."
He said he changed his passwords and tried to pass the incident off to his wife as a "teachable moment," but she was having none of it and told him, "It is our money. No more Internet banking for you!"
(He would have benefited from reading Larry Magid's tips for avoiding phishing scams.)
Earlier on Wednesday, the FBI in Los Angeles announced indictments of 100 people in the U.S. and Egypt, and the arrest of 33 people in California, Nevada, and North Carolina as part of "Operation Phish Phry"--the largest cybercrime investigation to date in the U.S.
Egyptian hackers are accused of targeting two U.S. financial institutions in phishing attacks and using the stolen bank account information to get unauthorized access to the accounts, coordinating with associates in the U.S. to transfer the money out of the accounts, the FBI alleges.
The U.S. defendants allegedly recruited "runners" to set up bank accounts where the funds from the compromised accounts could be transferred and withdrawn. There were hundreds or thousands of bank customer victims, the FBI estimated.
"It's the largest international phishing case ever conducted," Mueller said.
Many of the scams come from people in Eastern Europe, he said. To support investigations in Romania, the FBI has agents embedded in the police agencies there and managed to arrest more than 100 people in that country and in the U.S. in the last year, he said.
During a question-and-answer session, Mueller was asked how vulnerable the U.S. is to attacks on its critical infrastructure. The U.S. is "well ahead of just about any country (in) walling off access to outsiders to our most sensitive" systems, he said. Officials have seen instances of cyberattacks by terrorists, but "they have not yet been of the magnitude that would cause us substantial concern," Mueller said.
Meanwhile, terrorists are using things like Google Earth as tools in their mission, he said.
One audience member submitted a comment card that the fear of the FBI reading citizen e-mail was greater than the fear of teenage hackers. The FBI does not intercept communications without a court order of some kind, Mueller said. "I would worry about that teenage hacker more than you should worry about us," he added.
"I'm comfortable with the stances we've taken," on balancing civil liberties and national security, he said, adding that he supports the Patriot Act because it "broke down the walls between the intelligence community and law enforcement." He warned people against revealing too much of their lives online, on sites like Facebook.
The personal moments shared with friends as a youth may later "come back to haunt you" during a job search, he said, despite the use of passwords and the supposed anonymity of screen names. "To the extent that you are going to rely on that forever, it's very, very weak security," Mueller said.
"I do not have a Facebook profile," he later added.
Young hackers also shouldn't expect to parlay their computer skills into a legitimate career if they get arrested for breaking into systems and serve time, he warned.
"You hack, you get caught," he said. "You are going to jail... You are not going to get a good job afterward. You are going to be identified as a person who has broken the law."
Asked what keeps him awake at night, Mueller responded: "The threat of a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist... One person with access to a biological or chemical agent can cause massive harm."
Related podcast: Symantec Internet safety adviser Marian Merritt discusses how to avoid being a phishing victim.
FBI Director Robert Mueller talks about how the agency fights cybercrime.
(Credit: James Martin/CNET News)
Elinor Mills covers Internet security and privacy. She joined CNET News in 2005 after working as a foreign correspondent for Reuters in Portugal and writing for The Industry Standard, the IDG News Service, and the Associated Press. E-mail Elinor. 
Yikes!
Many articles published by the San Jose Mercury News said to never give your credit card number so someone who calls you. Then gues what the Mercury News does, they call me and ask for my credit card to renew my subscription. Go figure. I responded with a tongue lashing and then sent an email to their editor and business editor but never got an answer.
While it's easy to take this view, you have to realize being good at one thing doesn't make you vigilant and aware in all areas. Running the FBI is probably a lot of politics and administrative stuff which he may be very good at. I work in tech support but do really idiotic things medically sometimes that my doctor scolds me about. I still have to call tech support for help with my dish or verizon although usually it's something that needs to be fixed on their part. I get "smart" people who spent years in school and are great at their jobs asking me what to me seems like the stupidest questions. That doesn't mean they aren't good at their job.
i wrote info on whats really going on at www.deepandcrazy.com
the conficter worms were decoys and the hackers succeeded in their evil plan to install an undetectable backdoor.
twitter is showing the strongest target by what their going through now of what i went through when it all started. it got where my DNS disconnects happened every 30 minutes for months on end. and my computers where very very laggy. they alter the Kernel/Bios and Firmware in hardware in your machines. the worm is cut in sections that keep each layer alive. besides Kernel/Bios/firmware of dvd/cd drive/ audio device ect., it also affect memory, hardrives, Burned CDs or DVDs, USB drives and Ports, Parsings and Bindings. and frequencys and phones..
i tried my hardest to not let it go outside my system, but no one came, and i was alone on this situation. and the only person i knew was infected was my own mother through a usb drive. i can give details to go deeper into the worm. example: the data the creates the worm is so spread out so avoid detection. i found sourcecodes in deleted files that showed the hacker looking for unused data throughout every system. when he breaks into servies, the dates change to eather year 2004 or 2 years prior to the current date. if anyone else got to see the incoming packets from sites controled by the worm, it may appear that they use random ports to connect to.
whats really going on is that the port numbers are commands that you can link using programs that show parsings and match them to the ports of incomings. each pieces of data of the worm has multiple uses.
when the worm starts off, it starts by using port 53 for dns lookup data. what ya dont know is i found 4 or 5 ways the hacker connects. one way is that port 53 always ends up with a ICMP packet that has data in it that consist of the hacker's IP that is scrambled. when i sent put up the info about the icmp consisting of the IP address of the hacker, i watched the source that he cant change yet that shows any attempts of alterations. he took out the source of his IP where the icmp packet returned Blank. it said ICMP type 3
when he did this, the worm could not find a specific IP that refered to a Yahoo IP.
i wrote it down and stored it. but there is a better way to get his IP address anytime..
i cant put it here due to the hacker watching me in the irc server room...
i need someones help to get this info out to the proper people that can use it that is way over due. it will definalty help microsoft. and i got info that will help you gain leads to the REAL hackers.
the worm has a psychological angle to it. it has many traps, and the fbi/wife/bank situation should be a warning to the others that want to point fingers at china or russia. any confusion or battles are another layer of camaflaugh redirecting you away from the hackers. by whats going on, i can assume that after i put fear in the hackers, they may given info on the worm to kid hacker wannabes so the hackers you catch may also be the victoms. the real hacker has gone to great lenghts to hide his identity. i have info that may lead to a name.
im hoping i get a respons from anyone that will help me which also will help everyone else possibly globally. thanks and peace...
also if you want to see one way the hackers are using the backdoors which also will show how they are stealing passwords. i was redirecting microsoft and others to see the software that connect to the servers of each service to get the passwords directly from their database. but now the site was altered to look innocent.
there is a program they ask for 300.00 that when ran, you chose the service, such as yahoo, msn, hotmail, gmail, aim, and a lot others, and click start, and it comes up with the password..
its not removed, so hopefully someone took notice..
I honestly trust Windows Live Mail more than Gmail...and Gmail has so much spam and so many outages.
;-)
I have experienced outages regularly.
Yahoo has been around too long and too many spams. But they interface was good until they updated recently without pagination.
So if you're reading this and you or your company owns a domain, talk to our system administrator or ISP and ask them how you can enable SPF for your domain.
For more information on SPF check out http://www.openspf.org/
Until their DNS entry gets hijacked anyway,
I find it funny that this article turned from "bad FBI, no Internet!" to hackers to WMDs. Apparently terrorism wins.
How often each day does the FBI jump in and steal your freedom?
Hyperbole much?
Why haven't banks gone over to use this like eTrade.
The fact that he's around 60 doesn't help either.
It's the agents in the trenches who are battling the criminals and understand how the game's played. Also, even though it's kind of a humorous name in a different context, they need to either use "cracker" or something else to describe hackers who engage in illegal activity. Hacking in and of itself is what any programmer does.
Why does our leadership suck so bad these days?
How about making the geeks jump through the hoops to customize, while automatically updating and securing all of the regular (dumb) users' computers and internet access.
If the car industry worked the way that these high-tech computer systems are currently working, we'd all have to have repair shops in our garages.
Wouldn't we all save hundreds of hours and dollars if a little bit more was done automatically?
This is not really going to stop all the unemployed hackers around the world. The FBI needs to start promoting people with actual technical expertise, and not just guys with law degrees from the right schools who "look like leaders" and suck up to the right politicians.
Most corporations will look for the cheapest solution because they are not punished when their systems are hacked... if their systems are compromised they just pay newspapers for a press release, say "oops", and pay for a year of identity monitoring.
http://www.judiciaryreport.com/fbi.htm
- by PeaceMaker101 November 3, 2009 4:43 AM PST
- sorry to say. but im stil waiting for responses that my message got out. the main hacker that created this smartbot made it in my machines. i been fighting since aug of 2008 and it still runs untouched by anyone at full force to this day. i am still infecting 2 thousand machines an hour 24/7 that started in febuary. i wrote emails to a lot of people and still get no responses. i found info leading to my emails and calls being intercepted.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(40 Comments)i wrote info on whats really going on at www.deepandcrazy.com
the conficter worms were decoys and the hackers succeeded in their evil plan to install an undetectable backdoor.
twitter is showing the strongest target by what their going through now of what i went through when it all started. it got where my DNS disconnects happened every 30 minutes for months on end. and my computers where very very laggy. they alter the Kernel/Bios and Firmware in hardware in your machines. the worm is cut in sections that keep each layer alive. besides Kernel/Bios/firmware of dvd/cd drive/ audio device ect., it also affect memory, hardrives, Burned CDs or DVDs, USB drives and Ports, Parsings and Bindings. and frequencys and phones..
i tried my hardest to not let it go outside my system, but no one came, and i was alone on this situation. and the only person i knew was infected was my own mother through a usb drive. i can give details to go deeper into the worm. example: the data the creates the worm is so spread out so avoid detection. i found sourcecodes in deleted files that showed the hacker looking for unused data throughout every system. when he breaks into servies, the dates change to eather year 2004 or 2 years prior to the current date. if anyone else got to see the incoming packets from sites controled by the worm, it may appear that they use random ports to connect to.
whats really going on is that the port numbers are commands that you can link using programs that show parsings and match them to the ports of incomings. each pieces of data of the worm has multiple uses.
when the worm starts off, it starts by using port 53 for dns lookup data. what ya dont know is i found 4 or 5 ways the hacker connects. one way is that port 53 always ends up with a ICMP packet that has data in it that consist of the hacker's IP that is scrambled. when i sent put up the info about the icmp consisting of the IP address of the hacker, i watched the source that he cant change yet that shows any attempts of alterations. he took out the source of his IP where the icmp packet returned Blank. it said ICMP type 3
when he did this, the worm could not find a specific IP that refered to a Yahoo IP.
i wrote it down and stored it. but there is a better way to get his IP address anytime..
i cant put it here due to the hacker watching me in the irc server room...
i need someones help to get this info out to the proper people that can use it that is way over due. it will definalty help microsoft. and i got info that will help you gain leads to the REAL hackers.
the worm has a psychological angle to it. it has many traps, and the fbi/wife/bank situation should be a warning to the others that want to point fingers at china or russia. any confusion or battles are another layer of camaflaugh redirecting you away from the hackers. by whats going on, i can assume that after i put fear in the hackers, they may given info on the worm to kid hacker wannabes so the hackers you catch may also be the victoms. the real hacker has gone to great lenghts to hide his identity. i have info that may lead to a name.
im hoping i get a respons from anyone that will help me which also will help everyone else possibly globally. thanks and peace...
also if you want to see one way the hackers are using the backdoors which also will show how they are stealing passwords. i was redirecting microsoft and others to see the software that connect to the servers of each service to get the passwords directly from their database. but now the site was altered to look innocent.
there is a program they ask for 300.00 that when ran, you chose the service, such as yahoo, msn, hotmail, gmail, aim, and a lot others, and click start, and it comes up with the password..
its not removed, so hopefully someone took notice..