Ghosts In The Automated Teller Machine

A global dragnet nabbed the alleged mastermind behind the biggest digital bank heist in history. That doesn’t mean it’s over.

- Charlie Devereux, Franz Wild, and Edward Robinson

As night fell in Taipei on July 10, 2016, most people in the city were hunkered down to ride out the end of a typhoon. Not Sergey Berezovsky and Vladimir Berkman. The two Russians made their way through the rain to an ATM at First Commercial Bank, one of Taiwan’s top lenders. Wearing hats and antipollution masks, they loitered at the machine for a moment. Then, as the astonished couple in line behind them later told the police, the ATM started disgorging cash without either man touching it. The men shoved the bills into a satchel and brushed past them. As the Russians drove off in a black sedan, the couple spotted something on the ground: One of the guys had dropped his bank card.

By the time detectives traced Berezovsky and Berkman to the nearby Grand Hyatt the next day, the Russians had already jetted off to Moscow by way of Hong Kong. And they were just two of 15 “money mules” who’d hit 41 ATMs at 22 branches of First Commercial over that stormy weekend, the cops learned, taking 83 million New Taiwan dollars (NT$), or about $2.6 million. Hackers, investigators discovered, had forced the machines to spit out cash. 

The Carbanak gang had struck again. 

Before WannaCry, before the Sony Pictures hack, and before the breaches that opened up Equifax and Yahoo!, there was a nasty bit of malware known as Carbanak. Unlike those spectacular attacks, this malware wasn’t created by people interested in paralyzing institutions for ransom, publishing embarrassing emails, or taking personal data. The Carbanak guys just wanted loot, and lots of it.