Report: Russian Police Detain Bank Hacker MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian police have detained a computer hacker accused of extorting $10,000 from a U.S. bank after breaking into its data base and threatening to publish accounts details, ORT television reported on Wednesday.
ORT said the alleged hacker was a 21-year-old college dropout from the Siberian oil town of Surgut, but did not identify either him or the ``well known'' bank. The Moscow police computer fraud unit had been brought into the case, it said, at the request of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. ``He sent a letter to the bank executives in which he issued what amounted to an ultimatum: If they didn't send him the money the information would be published,'' Alexander Slutsky, head of the computer fraud unit, told ORT. He said the hacker had posted on a secondary Internet site details of some of the 1,500 accounts he had accessed, in order to prove to the bank that his intentions were serious. The television said the U.S. bank had paid the ransom and showed what it said was footage of the hacker being detained and the home computer he had used for the operation. It did not say when the arrest had occurred. Alexander Zhuravlyov, a senior detective, told ORT that investigation showed that the suspect had learned his skills from a Moscow-based Web site where hackers swapped information. ORT said the suspect was likely to face charges of extortion rather than computer fraud. Cases of fraud have multiplied in recent years in Russia and the country has also earned a reputation for developing talented computer specialists. Programmer Dmitry Sklyarov returned to Moscow on New Year's Eve after escaping prosecution under U.S. copyright law in connection with a presentation about software he developed to circumvent copyright protections in a computer program.
