The Russian Connection

Abstract

Well, it seems that our good friends in Russia have gotten the new year off to a great start, great that is if you are a cyber criminal. The exploits of the now nearly world-famous hacker ‘Maxus’ are spreading quickly in the popular media. According to press reports (largely formed from the information Maxus has doled out to the reporters), Maxus penetrated the customer database of an online retailer of CDs and claims he made off with perhaps as many as 300 000 individual credit card accounts. This incident should serve as a sobering wake-up call to all the eager executives who have been early adopters of E-commerce. Although it is too early to know the full extent of confirmed losses, there has been some preliminary confirmation by a number of online and print media journalists of the validity of several of the accounts that were compromised. This leads me to believe Maxus is probably telling the truth about the extent of the ‘achievement’, but I will reserve judgement as to whether he’s only 18 years old and is in fact, even a ‘he’ at all.