A sophisticated Malaysian cyber bandit hacked into the US Federal Reserve's computers and also stole nearly half a million credit and debit card numbers, US prosecutors in New York said. Lin Mun Poo, a Malaysian resident and citizen, was arrested on October 21 soon after entering the United States and was indicted by grand jury Thursday, the US attorney's office in Brooklyn said.
He allegedly hacked into the Cleveland, Ohio branch of the Fed, the US central bank, stole more than 400,000 card numbers, and breached the defences of other systems. Poo, who is being held in pre-trial detention, "made a career of compromising computer servers belonging to financial institutions, defence contractors, and major corporations, among others, and selling or trading the information," the US attorney's office said.
The 32-year-old was arrested by the US Secret Service a few hours after flying into John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. "Secret Service agents seized his heavily encrypted laptop computer, which contained a massive quantity of financial account data and personal identifying information that he had allegedly obtained by hacking," the prosecutor's office said.
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