Jail for gang who attempted £229m bank robbery

A gang who attempted the cybercrime of the century by trying to steal £229 million from a bank have been sentenced to jail.

Belgian hackers Jan van Osselaer, 32, and Gilles Poelvoorde, 35, were sneaked into the London offices of the Sumitomo Mitsui bank by security supervisor Kevin O’Donoghue, who sabotaged CCTV systems and erased surveillance footage to cover their tracks. On one occasion, when quizzed by a co-worker as to why the men were present, O’Donoghue said they were there for a game of late night poker.

Once inside, Van Osselaer and Poelvoorde used USB memory sticks to install keylogging and screen-grabbing spyware onto the bank’s terminals, in order to steal the usernames and passwords of banking staff.

Meanwhile, 61-year-old Hugh Rodley, of Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, and Soho sex shop owner David Nash, had been busy setting up a network of bank accounts…

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, Threads, Bluesky, or drop him an email.