A 20-year-old man from Adelaide has been charged with allegedly using about 3,000 computers across the world to steal confidential banking details through a complex web of computer viruses.
He is also thought to be involved in developing a type of software that could infect over 70,000 computers.
He has been charged by the South Australian police with offenses including unauthorised modification of computer data, supply and possession of a computer virus with intent to commit a serious computer offence, unlawful operation of a computer system and theft.
His arrest is the culmination of an investigation lasting three months into electronic crimes by the South Australian Police and the Australian Federal Police, while his arrest is expected to produce intelligence about other offenders.
“It will be alleged that the arrested man unlawfully compromised over 3,000 computers throughout Australia and worldwide by infecting those computers with malicious software,” the South Australian Police said in a statement.
According to the statement, the man allegedly used the software that was designed to “capture banking credentials and credit card information from compromised machines”.
“Additionally, it is suspected that this offender had developed capabilities to launch distributed denial of service attacks with up to 74,000 worldwide.”
A “denial of service attack” is the same type of offensive that was launched against social networking sites Twitter and Facebook last week, which brought both sites down for hours.
The arrest comes shortly after a crime syndicate in Melbourne used stolen credit card numbers to purchase gift cards that were then sold for a profit of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Department store giants Myer and David Jones were both affected in the scheme.
A recent survey from ACI Worldwide also found that 15% of Australians have suffered from fraud related to credit and debit cards. About 10% say they have suffered one incident of credit fraud, while 2.58% said they have experienced fraud twice.
The Adelaide man is expected to appear before the Magistrates Court next month.
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
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