Romanian cops cuff 20 phishing suspects

Romania police arrested 20 suspected phishing fraud suspects on Wednesday.

Stefan Negrila, chief of the organised crime police in the western Romanian city of Timisoara, said the alleged hackers set up counterfeit banking websites that they used to trick surfers in Italy and Spain into handing over sensitive login credentials.

Phishing mule accomplices in the targeted countries then used these stolen credentials to "cash out" compromised accounts in a fraud whose losses might run into hundreds of thousands of euros, The International Herald Tribune reports.

Police in Romanian separately arrested another unnamed hacker who allegedly used the servers of US universities and government agencies to launch attacks on banking websites, the paper adds.

In other cybercrime-related news, the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) has developed a data standard for the submission of e-crime reports. The format, recently submitted as a standard to the Internet Engineering Task Force, would allow information on scams to be far more easily collated, exchange and searched than is currently possible, IDG reports. ®