Mysterious story

There was a time when hackers hunted for hacking to satisfy their own curiosity and research itch, and the harm that malware could do was limited to turning the image on the screen upside down and obscene sounds coming from the computer speaker. Then times changed, and selfish motives came to the fore. Cybercrime has adopted the most modern hacking methods, and banks have become one of the main targets of hacker attacks. As they say, just a business, nothing personal.

One of the most notorious cases of bank hacking – far from the first, but widely publicized in the media – happened back in 1994, and had, as they say now, a “Russian trace”. On June 30, 1994, a graduate of the Leningrad Institute of Technology, 27-year-old microbiologist Vladimir Levin invaded the computer system of the American Citibank, and within five months stole more than $ 12 million from client accounts. At the same time, about a quarter of a million has not yet been found, despite the efforts of the FBI officers who took an active part in the investigation of the incident. Since the villain did not pay enough attention to his own anonymity, the FBI members quickly found out that the hacking was carried out from the premises of the St. Petersburg computer company Saturn SPb, and with the help of the employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia, they quickly identified the identity of the hacker. It turned out to be an employee of this small company, Vladimir Leonidovich Levin, born in 1967, who lived with his parents in a modest apartment on Svetlanovsky Prospekt. Since there was no article for computer crimes in the Russian Criminal Code of that time, it was not possible to bring Levin to justice. To arrest the hacker, the intelligence officers decided to lure him abroad, for which they started a whole psychological game. They forced the detained accomplices to call Levin on the phone with messages that he was about to be caught, and their Russian colleagues set brothers on Vladimir, demanding to share his unearned income. Unable to withstand such pressure, Levin decided to flee to the UK to an acquaintance of his mother, where he was detained right at Stansted airport, barely getting off the plane. It happened on March 3, 1995.