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WHAT'S IN YOUR WALLET?

Gram, Lending Tree, and Capital One Financial, one of the largest credit card issuers in the country. NightFox had vast databases of internal corporate e-mail addresses he'd acquired from a “competitive intelligence” firm, and he sent Max thousands of them, spread across all the targets.

On September 29, Max fired up his spamming software and flung a personalized e-mail at his victims. The message was from “Gordon Reily,” with the return address g.reily@lendingnewsgroup.com.

I am a reporter for Lending News doing a follow up story on the recent leak of customer records from Capital One. I saw the name Mary Rheingold in the article from Financial Edge and would like to interview you for a follow up piece.

http://financialedgenews.com/news/09/29/Disclosure_CapitalOne

If you have time I would greatly appreciate an opportunity to further discuss the details of the above article.

Each copy of the message was customized, so every employee would think he or she was mentioned by name in the notional Financial Edge article. At Capital One, 500 employees got the message, from executives to PR spokespeople and IT workers. About 125 of them clicked on the poisoned link and were sent to a page loaded with generic finance industry news. While they puzzled over the page, a hidden payload zipped through the corporate firewall and onto their machines.

The software opened a back door that would allow Max to slip in at his leisure and scour the victims' hard drives for sensitive data, sniff the banks' internal networks, steal passwords. It wasn't much different from what he'd done to thousands of Defense Department computers a lifetime ago. Back when it was all just fun and games.