Russian hacker sells a Lada to pay off RBS

RUSSIAN HACKER Viktor Pleshchuk has had to sell his Lada in order to compensate the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) after breaching its Worldpay service and nabbing £6m.

With £6m you'd think Pleshchuk would have quite a lot of bling, but the BBC reports that two flats and two cars, a BMW and a Lada, were auctioned off in Saint Petersburg on Monday. While Pleshchuk reportedly stole £6m, the sale of those assets raised just £200,000, presumably with the Lada accounting for a very small part of the total.

Pleshchuk confessed to ripping of the RBS Worldpay service after getting access to the personal data of thousands of its customers. This information was used to create debit cards and withdraw cash from ATMs all over the world.

Pleshchuk and seven other hackers took money from 2,100 ATMs in 280 cities using the data.

Security researchers were stunned not by the acquisition of personal data but rather by the fact that the hackers had so many people to physically extract the cash from ATMs. Kaspersky Lab's Alex Gostev said, "They had to find more than 150 people in [numerous] cities, give each one of them the instructions and the fake cards, organise synchronised withdrawal - all of this shows that it was a group of highly skilled professionals."

RBS might be slightly miffed that all it could get back was the proceeds from selling two flats, a BMW and a Lada. Perhaps the bean counters at the predominantly state-owned British bank were hoping that Pleshchuk had bought gold before it hit $1,000 an ounce. µ