50 Fun Facts About Cybercrime

Which file-sharing site did the FBI shut in 2012 as New Zealand police raided Kim Dotcom's mansion?

Megaupload was accused of operating as a business dedicated to copyright infringement. Its German-born founder, born Kim Schmitz, was arrested at a leased estate near Auckland, one of the country's priciest homes.

Where was Ross Ulbricht sitting when the FBI arrested him for running the Silk Road drug market?

A public library in San Francisco was where the FBI pounced, after two agents posed as quarrelling lovers to distract him. A third grabbed the open laptop before he could encrypt it.

The Mirai botnet that took down major websites in 2016 was first aimed at servers for which game?

Minecraft servers were the first targets, because Mirai's authors were running a protection racket against their hosts. The botnet itself was built from hijacked home routers and internet cameras.

Which unreleased game did a teenage Lapsus$ hacker leak using an Amazon Fire Stick in a hotel room?

Grand Theft Auto VI clips spread online in 2022 after Arion Kurtaj broke into Rockstar with the Fire Stick, a hotel TV and a phone. He was on bail at the time and police had taken his laptop.

The 1989 AIDS Trojan, the first documented ransomware, reached its victims through the post on what?

Floppy disks labelled as AIDS information were mailed out by biologist Joseph Popp. After 90 start-ups the program scrambled file names and demanded $189, payable to a post office box in Panama.

Which fraud, seen in Superman III and Office Space, skims fractions of a cent off many transactions?

Salami slicing is named for cutting a sausage one thin slice at a time, so no single loss gets noticed. In 2008 a man was arrested for collecting a few cents at a time through 58,000 fake brokerage accounts.

A teenager's 2020 bitcoin scam hijacked Barack Obama's and Elon Musk's accounts on which platform?

Twitter employees were manipulated into giving up their logins, which opened the company's internal tools to the hackers. Graham Ivan Clark, a 17-year-old from Florida, was charged as an adult on 30 felony counts.

Engineers Arup lost about $25 million when a Hong Kong employee joined a video call faked with what?

AI deepfakes copied the faces and voices of senior Arup officials on the call. Convinced the meeting was real, the employee paid the fraudsters in a string of separate transfers.

Which scam from China builds a fake online romance, then steers victims into bogus crypto schemes?

Pig butchering likens winning a victim's trust to fattening a hog before the slaughter. Interpol now prefers the name romance baiting, fearing the original label shames victims into silence.

A misspelled order helped stop hackers taking almost $1 billion from which country's central bank?

Bangladesh still lost $81 million, which vanished into casinos in the Philippines. The thieves sent 35 payment orders over the SWIFT network, and the New York Fed blocked 30 of them.

Which hoax-call crime, named for an armed police unit, sends officers to an innocent person's home?

Swatting turned deadly in 2017, when a hoax call over a Call of Duty dispute led police to shoot an uninvolved man in Wichita, Kansas. The caller was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison.

Which word describes publishing someone's home address and other private details online to harass them?

Doxxing grew out of 1990s hacker feuds, in which 'dropping dox' on a rival was an old-school revenge tactic. The word is a respelling of docs, short for documents.

Which crime secretly uses a stranger's computer, often via a website, to mine coins such as Monero?

Cryptojacking was dominated by Coinhive, a script behind over two-thirds of cases before it shut down in 2019. Criminals favour privacy coins because their transaction histories are hidden.

Which fraud has criminals talk phone company staff into moving a victim's number to a new card?

SIM swapping hands the thief every text-message code that banks and email services send as a second login step. Some gangs skip the smooth talk and simply bribe telecom employees.

Which trick registers web addresses one letter off famous ones to catch people who hit a wrong key?

Typosquatting, also called URL hijacking, pays off in several ways: the lookalike page can show adverts, install malware or copy a brand's login form to harvest passwords.

Which word for phishing by text borrows its first letters from the name of the texting standard?

Smishing joins SMS and phishing, and the bait is usually a message posing as a trusted sender with a malicious link. The voice-call version of the trick is called vishing.

What name is given to someone who moves stolen funds through their own bank account for a small cut?

Money mule recruits are often hired through adverts for 'payment processing agents' and may not know the cash is criminal. The role keeps the real fraudsters at a distance from the risky transfer.

Which attack tries passwords stolen from one site on many others, betting that people reuse them?

Credential stuffing works because so many people recycle logins: in one survey, 81% of users had reused a password on two or more sites. Attackers automate the attempts on a huge scale.

Which crypto scam hit buyers of a Squid Game token in 2021 when its makers vanished with the cash?

Rug pull is crypto slang for creators who hype a coin and then abscond with the funds put in. The Squid token carried a warning sign: buyers found they were not allowed to resell it.

Which attack, shown at the 2010 Black Hat conference, makes a cash machine spit out its banknotes?

Jackpotting had its showpiece when New Zealand hacker Barnaby Jack made two ATMs spew notes on stage. He had planted malware that dispensed currency on his command.

Which hacker blamed time in solitary on a claim that whistling into a phone could start nuclear war?

Kevin Mitnick said officials convinced a judge he could launch missiles by whistling into a prison payphone. Caught in 1995 after two and a half years as a fugitive, he later became a security consultant.

Hacker Albert Gonzalez robbed TJX of millions of card numbers while informing for which US agency?

Secret Service agents had let him avoid jail in return for evidence against his ShadowCrew forum. He went on to take 45.6 million card numbers from TJX and was sentenced to 20 years.

Vladimir Levin was seized at a London airport in 1995 for wiring $10 million out of which bank?

Citibank's dial-up wire transfer service let the Russian shift corporate customers' funds to accomplices in five countries. Scotland Yard caught him changing planes at Stansted.

Which Russian gang's alleged boss, Maksim Yakubets, drove a Lamborghini with a 'thief' number plate?

Evil Corp's leader was described in Russian media as the hacker who stole $100 million, and the US put a $5 million bounty on him. His wedding, to an FSB officer's daughter, was just as lavish.

Which fake cryptocurrency did 'Cryptoqueen' Ruja Ignatova sell before vanishing on a 2017 flight?

OneCoin was called one of the biggest scams in history by The Times. Its founder boarded a Ryanair flight from Sofia to Athens, was never seen again and joined the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list in 2022.

Online rapper Heather Morgan and her husband laundered bitcoin stolen in 2016 from which exchange?

Bitfinex lost 119,756 bitcoins, worth about $72 million at the time. The share US agents recovered in 2022 was by then valued at $3.6 billion, and her husband admitted carrying out the hack himself.

Which hacking crew that knocked the CIA website offline in 2011 was betrayed by its leader 'Sabu'?

LulzSec co-founder Hector Monsegur, alias Sabu, spent over ten months as an FBI informant while facing a possible 124 years in prison. He helped agents identify the group's other hackers.

Aaron Swartz, a Reddit co-owner, faced up to 35 years in prison for bulk-downloading which archive?

JSTOR articles were pulled down by a computer he had wired into the MIT network from an unlocked closet. Prosecutors answered with two counts of wire fraud and eleven computer-crime charges.

The four men behind The Pirate Bay were each sentenced to a year in jail in 2009 in which country?

Sweden's Stockholm District Court also fined the four 30 million kronor for promoting copyright infringement. When the Supreme Court refused an appeal in 2012, the site moved to a .se address.

Silk Road boss Ross Ulbricht took his alias, Dread Pirate Roberts, from a character in which film?

The Princess Bride makes its pirate a title passed from one man to the next. Ulbricht's lawyers leaned on that at trial, admitting he founded the site but arguing someone else had taken over the alias.

A 2021 ransomware attack on which fuel supplier set off panic buying across the south-eastern US?

Colonial Pipeline, which carries about 45% of the East Coast's fuel, paid the hackers 75 bitcoin within hours. Their way in had been a single stolen password for a disused VPN account.

Which country declared a national emergency in 2022 after Conti ransomware hit its finance ministry?

Costa Rica's new president said the country was in a state of war with the hackers, who had struck nearly 30 government bodies. Conti demanded $10 million; the US offered the same sum for its leaders.

The 2017 NotPetya attack began with a poisoned update to tax software widely used in which country?

Ukraine suffered about 80% of the infections, and radiation monitoring at Chernobyl went offline. The malware posed as ransomware but worked as a wiper, destroying data beyond recovery.

Which casino giant was breached in 2023 after hackers phoned its help desk posing as an employee?

MGM Resorts was targeted, the Scattered Spider gang claimed, because it had caught them trying to rig its slot machines. The hackers had found the employee they impersonated on LinkedIn.

A former Amazon cloud engineer stole data on 106 million people from which bank in 2019?

Capital One hosted its data with Amazon Web Services, where Paige Thompson had previously worked as a software engineer. Her haul included about 140,000 Social Security numbers.

Which Tokyo bitcoin exchange, first built to trade fantasy game cards, collapsed in 2014 with 850,000 coins missing?

Mt. Gox is short for Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange, the card-trading site it began as. It was handling over 70% of the world's bitcoin trades when it failed, which led Japan to write its first formal rules for crypto exchanges.

Which blockchain pet-battling game lost about $620 million in 2022 to hackers linked to North Korea?

Axie Infinity's maker took six days to notice that 173,600 Ether and 25.5 million USDC had left its Ronin Network in just two transactions. Investigators tied the raid to the Lazarus Group.

Canadian Alexandre Cazes, alleged founder of dark web site AlphaBay, was arrested in which country?

Thailand was his home when a rookie slip caught up with him: AlphaBay's early welcome emails had gone out from his personal Hotmail address, which he also used on his LinkedIn profile.

Which 2000 email worm's author went free because the Philippines then had no law against hacking?

ILOVEYOU was written by college dropout Onel de Guzman, and prosecutors had to drop every charge against him. President Joseph Estrada then signed an e-commerce law to cover such acts.

Which 2017 ransomware worm hit hospitals in England and Scotland, forcing ambulances to divert?

WannaCry may have affected up to 70,000 health service devices, including MRI scanners and blood-storage fridges. It reached over 300,000 computers in 150 countries and was blamed on North Korea.

The Guy Fawkes mask worn by Anonymous hacktivists was drawn for which graphic novel, filmed in 2005?

V for Vendetta illustrator David Lloyd drew the smiling face with its upturned moustache for the anarchist hero V. After the film it became a protest symbol, and it is now also known as the Anonymous mask.

Tor, the network that hid Silk Road, wraps data in layers of encryption likened to which vegetable?

Onion routing gave Tor its name: the software began as The Onion Routing project, built on work by US Naval Research Laboratory staff. Each relay peels away one layer to learn only the next stop.

Which actress played an analyst whose identity is erased by hackers in the 1995 thriller The Net?

Sandra Bullock's Angela Bennett is a reclusive freelancer who works remotely from Venice, California. Her trouble starts when she discovers a backdoor in a widely used computer-security system.

Which dating app names a 2022 Netflix documentary about a conman posing as a diamond mogul's son?

Tinder was where Simon Leviev, born Shimon Hayut, met the women he manipulated into paying for his lavish lifestyle. His pretext was that he needed the cash to escape his enemies.

Which 1986 US anti-hacking law grew from a bill whose committee report cited the film WarGames?

Computer Fraud and Abuse Act prosecutions include a famous early one: the author of the 1988 Morris worm was convicted under it for unauthorised access to 'federal interest' computers.

The first international treaty on computer crime, dating from 2001, is named after which city?

Budapest was where the convention opened for signature, though it was drawn up by the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. Canada, Japan and the United States took part as observer states.

Which network did the Blanc brothers corrupt in 1834 to get Paris stock prices in Bordeaux early?

The optical telegraph was reserved for government use, so the two bankers bribed operators near Tours. Cleared because no law forbade the trick, François Blanc went on to run the Monte Carlo Casino.

Which 2004 worm, written by German teenager Sven Jaschan, forced Delta Air Lines to cancel flights?

Sasser also knocked out the British Coastguard's electronic mapping for hours. A $250,000 Microsoft bounty helped lead German police to its 18-year-old author, a technical college student.

Which hacker group knocked Xbox Live and PlayStation Network offline on Christmas Day 2014?

Lizard Squad had threatened the festive strike in advance. One member told Sky News, without remorse, that it was meant to embarrass tech giants and make people spend time with their families.

Police in which country secretly ran the dark web market Hansa for weeks in 2017 to trap its users?

Netherlands officers took complete control once the site's two German administrators were arrested, then impersonated them. When rival AlphaBay was shut down, its users flooded straight into the trap.