Around 100 charged in Operation Phish Phry

2009-10-08

Almost 100 people have been charged in the US and Egypt as part of an FBI crackdown on cyber fraud phishing. Director Robert Mueller said that Operation Phish Phry was part of the ongoing "cyber arms race".

The defendants in Operation Phish Phry targeted US banks and stole financial data, using it to transfer around $1.5 million (£940,085) to bogus accounts they controlled. Now, over 50 people in California, Nevada and North Carolina as well as nearly 50 Egyptian citizens have been charged with crimes such as money laundering and aggravated identify theft.

A two-year investigation was led by the FBI's Los Angeles office, which worked closely with the Secret Service, the Electronics Crimes Task Force in Los Angeles as well as state and local law enforcement and bodies in Egypt. This was the first cyber investigation run between the US and Egypt.

Mr Mueller commented: "The FBI is both a law enforcement and national security agency, which means we can and must address every angle of a cyber case. This is critical, because what may start as a criminal investigation may lead to a national security threat.

"At the start of a cyber investigation, we do not know whether we are dealing with a spy, a company insider or an organised criminal group."

He asserted that even something as ordinary as a phishing scam could be an attempt by a terrorist organisation to raise funds for an operation. Every personal, academic, business and government network plays a role in national cyber security, Mr Mueller stated.

The FBI is still outnumbered by cybercriminals so it is important that people do what they can to help, he added, meaning they should protect their home computers with firewalls, anti-virus software and strong passwords.

Dr Mark Gregory, a senior lecturer in network engineering at RMIT, recently told ABC News that most of the measures people take for security can be broken "easily" by hackers.

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