Compliance March 20, 2007
Road Warriors, Beware!
If you access your retirement accounts online while on the road, be careful.
Reported by Nevin E. Adams
Those accounts may have been targeted by hackers, according to a news report.
ABC News is reporting that cybercriminals are hacking their way into accounts and looting 401k and online stock trading accounts, citing comments from officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The report says that in many cases workers have had their user IDs and passwords stolen when they use computers at hotel business centers and other Internet connection points.
Wake Up “Call”
“You could wake up one morning and find all your money in your retirement account or in your trading account is gone,” said John Reed Stark, Chief of Internet Enforcement at the Securities and Exchange Commission. The FBI says the criminals bug those computers in the business resource centers with programs to record every key typed. That kind of keystroke recording was recently at issue in a case involving the Federal government’s own Thrift Savings Plan (see Hackers Make Off with $35,000 of TSP Participant Money).
In addition to the Russian rings, authorities have also seen hackers in India, Hong Kong and Malaysia going after similar online accounts, according to the report.
Victims have included customers of E-trade, Scott Trade, Ameritrade, Fidelity, Merrill Lynch, Charles Schwab and Vanguard.
A video report is online HERE