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Catch Those Bastards and Put Them Away

Top News Article | Reuters.com:


BERLIN (Reuters) - German police have arrested seven members of an international gang of so-called "phishers", who hacked into computers of internet banking customers and raided their accounts, authorities said on Tuesday.

"The investigation is continuing but what we can say now is they were able to obtain thousands of individual pieces of data," a spokeswoman for the BKA federal crime office said.

Three other members of the ring are still under investigation.

The word "phishing" is said to derive from a combination of two words, which describes the act of hackers "fishing" for "passwords".

A statement posted on the BKA Web site said the shutdown of the phishing ring of Germans and Lithuanians had prevented "millions of euros of losses" that online banking customers would have incurred if the phishers had carried out their plan.

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