Arrest for ‘housebreaker who installed spyware’

Graham Cluley
Graham Cluley
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According to media reports from Japan, police have arrested a man who is believed to have broken into a house and installed spyware on his victims’ computer.

Police claim that 37-year-old Takamasa Kondo stole a door key to a Tokyo apartment from its mailbox, and installed a copy of the BugBear virus onto the victim’s PC. The virus grabbed keystrokes as the innocent party logged into his bank account, allegedly allowing Kondon to break into the bank account from an internet cafe and steal 9 million yen (approximately US $100,000).

There are a few things about this story that are unusual. The first is that, if what the police claim is true, the hacker directly installed the malware onto the victim’s PC. Although this is not unprecedented, it is much more usual for cybercriminals to not put themselves at personal risk or danger, and hide behind…

Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.

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Graham Cluley is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry, having worked for a number of security companies since the early 1990s when he wrote the first ever version of Dr Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit for Windows. Now an independent analyst, he regularly makes media appearances and is an international public speaker on the topic of cybersecurity, hackers, and online privacy. Follow him on Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky, or drop him an email.