SHARJAH The cyber criminal who hacked into a Sharjah bank last month has gone on the rampage. After the bank refused to give into his blackmail and pay $3 million in ransom money, the criminal Hacker Buba has posted the confidential details of more UAE customers online. In the latest round of leaks, he has released details of 50,000
credit card users, account balances of 64,000 customers and 100,000 transaction histories among a slew of other information in six zip files.
Temporary storage
Until recently this vast data sat on the website of an Eastern European basketball team, apparently also hacked by Buba and used as a temporary storage. At one point, over 50 seemingly unrelated Twitter accounts were tweeting the message signed Hacker Buba and carrying a link to the website of the basketball team. On November 26, XPRESS
reported the database breach, detailing how Buba was leaking the sensitive data of corporates, individuals and government entities every few hours via his Twitter account. He had said that he would not stop until he was
paid the ransom in Bitcoins. Now he has carried out the threat. According to online newspaper The Daily Dot which contacted XPRESS and also quoted it in a subsequent report, the new set of data appears genuine. One database analysed by them reportedly included the sensitive information of around 40,000 customers, including their names, credit card numbers and birthdays. “It is so scary. How much I spent on groceries last year, where I shopped for clothes, where I had that coffee, my salary, every thing is out there on a public platform,” said a Dubai-based
Arab businessman who is among thousands whose accounts have been compromised. A representative of an electronic
major said they have withdrawn all their money from the bank. “It was in millions. We cannot take any chances,” he said. The bank in question declined to give an update on the case despite repeated requests while a comment was not readily available from the Telecom Regulatory Authority (TRA) which is said to be investigating the breach.
