Nov 20, 2010

About that hacked Federal Reserve network story

There are reports on the Internet about a man from Malaysia who hacked the Federal Reserve.

PCWorld has the complete story.

A June 2010 hacking incident that compromised a network at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland happened on a test system and not the bank's production servers.

On Thursday, Lin Mun Poo was charged with hacking the Fed and other U.S. corporations, including payment processor FedComp and an unnamed federal defense contractor. He was arrested on Oct. 21 following a U.S. Secret Service sting.

The Secret Service says it found more than 400,000 bank card numbers on Poo's laptop at the time of his arrest. But those numbers apparently did not come from the Fed, which said Friday that none of its sensitive data was compromised during the incident.

Poo, a resident of Malaysia, was arrested just hours after landing in the U.S. after allegedly selling $1,000 (USD) worth of bank card numbers to another man at a Brooklyn diner. Prosecutors said he was in the U.S. to set up a deal to sell more stolen card numbers.

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