Essay About Transfer Funds And Number Of Financial Institutions

How Bank Hacking Works
Essay title: How Bank Hacking Works
A certain number of financial institutions that reside within the
packet-switched confines of the various X.25 networks use their connections to
transfer funds from one account to another, one mutual fund to another, one
stock to another, one bank to another, etc It is conceivable that if one
could intercept these transactions and divert them into another account, they
would be transferred (and could be withdrawn) before the computer error was
noticed. Thus, with greed in our hearts, an associate and I set forth to test
this theory and conquer the international banking world.
We chose CitiCorp as our victim. This multinational had two address
prefixes of its own on Telenet (223 & 224). Starting with those two prefixes,
my associate and I began to sequentially try every possible address. We
continued through 1000 in increments of one, then A-Z, then 1000-10000 by 10s,
and finally 10000-99999 by 100s. Needless to say, many addresses were
probably skipped over in our haste to find valid ones, but many we passed over
were most likely duplicate terminals that we had already encountered.
For the next few days my associate and I went over the addresses we had
found, comparing and exchanging information, and going back to the addresses
that had shown NOT OPERATING, REMOTE PROCEDURE ERROR, and REJECTING. We
had discovered many of the same types of systems, mostly VAX/VMSs and Primes.
We managed to get into eight of the VAXen and then went forth on the CitiCorp
DECNET, discovering many more. We entered several GS1 gateways and Decservers
and found that there were also links leading to systems belonging to other
financial institutions such as Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank New York and Chase
Manhattan. We also found hundreds of addresses to TWX machines and many
in-house bank terminals (most of which were BUSY during banking hours, and
NOT OPERATING during off hours). In fact, the only way we knew that these
were bank terminals was that an operator happened to be idle just as I
connected with her terminal (almost like the Whoopie Goldberg movie, “Jumpin
Jack Flash,” not quite as glamorous …yet.)
Many of the computers we eventually did penetrate kept alluding to the
electronic fund transfer in scripts, files, and personal mail. One of the
TOPS-20 machines we found even had an account EFTMKTG.EFT, (password EFTEFT)!
All the traces pointed to a terminal (or series of terminals) that did nothing
but transfer funds. We decided that this was the case and decided to
concentrate our efforts on addresses that allowed us to CONNECT periodically
but did not respond. After another week of concentrated effort, we managed to
sort through these. Many were just terminals that had been down or
malfunctioning, but there were five left that we still had no idea of their
function. My associate said that we might be able to monitor data
transmissions on the addresses if we could get into the debug port. With this
idea in mind, we set out trying sub-addresses from .00 to .99 on the mystery
addresses. Four of the five had their debug ports at the default location
(.99). The fifth was located 23 away from the default. That intrigued us, so
we put the others aside and concentrated on the fifth. Although