Risks Digest: A $60,000,000,000 fraud and other horrors

[septimus]

How many Dopers are aware of The Forum (newsletter) on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems ? The link will take you to the latest issue. I just edit the URL (e.g. change the final ‘55’ to ‘54’) to get prior issues.

Below I’ve copied a very small fraction of the headlines just from the past few days. Careful! If you start reading the newsletter, and clicking the most interesting links, it may become a full-time job!

Stock traders are accused of siphoning $60 billion from state coffers, in a scheme that one called “the devil’s machine.” Germany is the first country to try to get its money back.

It May Be the Biggest Tax Heist Ever. And Europe Wants Justice. (Published 2020)

From 2006 to 2011, … hundreds of bankers, lawyers and investors made off with a staggering $60 billion, all of it siphoned from the state coffers of European countries.

As one participant would later put it, taxpayer funds were an irresistible mark for a simple reason: They never ran out.

The scheme was built around … a monetary maneuver to avoid double taxation of investment profits that plays out like high finance’s answer to a David Copperfield stage illusion. Through careful timing, and the coordination of a dozen different transactions, cum-ex trades produced two refunds for dividend tax paid on one basket of stocks.
… Germany was hardest hit, with an estimated $30 billion in losses, followed by France, taken for about $17 billion. Smaller sums were drained away from Spain, Italy, Belgium, Austria, Norway, Finland, Poland and others.

Outrage in these countries has focused on the City of London, Britain’s answer to Wall Street. Less scrutinized has been the role played by Americans, both individual investors and branches of United States investment banks in London, including Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

American bankers didn’t try cum-ex at home because they feared domestic regulators. So they moved operations to London and treated the rest of Europe as an anything-goes frontier. Frank Tibo, a former chief tax officer at a bank where Mr. Shields and Mr. Mora worked, said American and British cum-ex traders regarded the Continent as a backwater of old economies ripe for swindling.

”There was this culture in London, and it really came from New York,” he said. “These guys were either from New York or trained in London at New York banks, and they looked at Europe as their playground. People at the highest levels were collaborating to rip off countries.”

Sixty Billion Dollars. That’s with an ‘S’ and a 'B."

The world’s 2,153 billionaires are richer than 4.6 billion people combined, Oxfam says

Georgia election systems could have been hacked before 2016 vote (Politico)
This was suspected years ago, but there was resistance (including erasure of main server data). Finally, after court order, we know: Yes, a key Georgia election server had suffered the “Shellshock” malware exploit.

Russians Hacked Ukrainian Gas Company at Center of Impeachment

Scientists Deliver, Once Again, a Horrifying Report About How Hot Earth Is Getting

A lazy fix 20 years ago means the Y2K bug is taking down computers now (New Scientist)

Programmers wanting to avoid the Y2K bug had two broad options: entirely rewrite their code, or adopt a quick fix called “windowing’', which would treat all dates from 00 to 20, as from the 2000s, rather than the 1900s. An estimated 80 per cent of computers fixed in 1999 used the quicker, cheaper option. [many systems with the bad fix are no longer in use. But there are many failures, in what is now called the Y2020 bug.]

Hackers Cripple Airport Currency Exchanges, Seeking $6 Million Ransom (NYTimes)

Boeing 737s can’t land facing west (FAA)

Inside the Billion-Dollar Battle Over .Org (Steve Lohr)

Anatomy of a Lie: How Iran Covered Up the Downing of an Airliner

(This is just a tiny sampling, from the last two issues.)

[Darren_Garrison]

17? That’s my guess. There should be a poll.

[Dewey_Finn]

Another one; about four years ago hackers used the SWIFT network to steal about a billion dollars from the central bank of Bangladesh, although all but about a hundred million was recovered.

[septimus]

@Dewey_Finn

Another one; about four years ago hackers used the SWIFT network to steal about a billion dollars from the central bank of Bangladesh, although all but about a hundred million was recovered.

That’s a very interesting story. Cute tricks that North Korea (yes, it was them) used included:
(1) timing the exploit so holidays gave maximum delay: Bangladesh was closed for Islam’s Friday Sabbath when it started; they got the Saturday-Sunday shutdown in New York, and on Monday the Philippines (where money was picked up) was celebrating Chinese New Year!
(2) hacking printer software not to print. Otherwise the Bangladeshis would have seen suspicious printouts as soon as they came back to work.

A piece of bad luck for the hackers kept them from getting much more than “only” $100 million. An account name they used resembled, by chance, some other fraudster, so software at the Fed-Res of N.Y. automatically put a hold on those transactions.

Meanwhile I read some more back issues.  Lots of interesting — and scary — stories.

(I read Risks Digest decades ago, but had forgotten about it.  I was reminded a few hours ago when I logged into an old Yahoo mail I almost never use — that account subscribes to Risks Digest.)

[Machine_Elf]

@Dewey_Finn

Another one; about four years ago hackers used the SWIFT network to steal about a billion dollars from the central bank of Bangladesh, although all but about a hundred million was recovered.

In 2014 about a billion dollars got swiped from Moldova; I haven’t read anything about the funds ever being recovered.

[Senegoid]

I knew of it.

The RISKS Digest has been around, in one format or another, for a long long time, all the way back into the Usenet days. I saw excerpts and discussions of it as far back as the mid-1980’s.

[jtur88]

It has more impact written as $60,000,000,000.00. But a lot less if expressed as “1/50,000th of the US debt”.