Robbing Banks In The 21st Century

Today's Crooks Targeting Computer Systems Instead Of Vaults

(CBS)  The most famous bank robbers of all time, Bonnie and Clyde, did it the old fashioned way: with guns, bank tellers, sacks of cash and a getaway car.

Bank robbery in the 21st century, as the Sumitomo Bank in London discovered, is more likely to be a high-tech heist.

AS CBS News Correspondent Sheila MacVicar reports, thieves walked into the bank and installed a piece of computer spyware called a keylogger, a device that records every stroke you make on a keyboard.

With the help of fraud expert Allan McDonagh, CBS News bought one for about $200.

It can take up to 2 million keystrokes. McDonagh says every stroke that is typed, including passwords and people's and bank's identities, is recorded.

"If on that computer, passwords were being used, people's identities are going there, bank's identities are really going there. It's dynamite,'' said McDonagh.

All the crooks had to do was recover the spyware, download passwords and account numbers and using the bank's own computers, set in motion ten transactions.

Using the stolen data, the thieves could have transferred the $423 million electronically. More than $26 million was destined for a bank account in Israel.

On Wednesday, the account owner was arrested and charged with money laundering.

The real problem for the bad guys in a case like this, says McDonagh, is finding a bank account where they can transfer large sums of money, where "no one is going to ask questions about who you are and why $20 million has turned up in the bank account."

Old-fashioned greed was enough to alert the bank, stop the transfers and in the end it seems the thieves got nothing. The banks, however, got a lesson in computer security.