Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!clyde.concordia.ca!uunet!jarthur!usc!apple!well!tenney
From: gilham@csl.sri.com (Fred Gilham)
Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.news
Subject: Re: Professional Crackers (was Re: How effective can the SS hope to be?)
Message-ID: <21181@well.sf.ca.us>
Date: 21 Sep 90 15:26:46 GMT
References: <44708@apple.Apple.COM> <1990Sep17.032934.15238@cs.rochester.edu>
	<37273@ut-emx>
Sender: tenney@well.sf.ca.us
Organization: Computer Science Lab, SRI International, Menlo Park, CA.
Lines: 37
Approved: comp-org-eff-news@well.sf.ca.us
In-reply-to: mnemonic@walt.cc.utexas.edu's message of 17 Sep 90 14:13:28 GMT

Mike Godwin writes:
----------------------------------------
I was at a bookstore on Saturday that had a $55 book called COMPUTER
CRIME (it may be a textbook). In looking through the book, which is
aimed at system administrators, MIS guys, and the heads of small
businesses, I noticed no references at all to the kinds of young
explorers we often "hackers" or "crackers." Instead, the the book
seemed based on the a priori proposition that ALL of the computer
crime that sysadmins would be dealing with would be of the
intercorporate or disgruntled employee sort. The book's copyright date
was 1989.
----------------------------------------

Several authors argue that the major financial impact of computer
crime comes from inside jobs.  In the March 1990 Communications of the
ACM, the president's letter has the following example:

----------
 Take for example the case of Harold Smith and Sammie Marshall.
Between 1976 and 1981, they embezzled $21.3 million from Wells Fargo
Bank.  The fraud was nothing but standard old check kiting.  Check
kiting is cashing a check on an account whose only deposit is a check
that has not cleared yet and then covering the draft on the other
account with another rubber check from the first bank, which is
covered by a rubber check from the second bank, etc. etc.  This can go
on indefinitely.  It is a game that anyone can play.  A major national
brokerage house was recently fined by the federal government for doing
the same thing on a massive scale.  Smith and Marshall played the game
from inside the bank.  Instead of using ordinary checks, they used the
bank's branch settlement system to keep a steadily growing mountain of
fraud in circulation within the branch settlement system.
----------

You'd have to make a lot of free phone calls to match that.
--
Fred Gilham    gilham@csl.sri.com
``Man was meant to lead with his chin.  He is only worth knowing with
his guard down, his head up, and his heart rampant on his sleeve.''
                                      -- Robert Farrar Capon