FBI combat criminal hackers, fraud and abuse.

 2005 FBI agent Daniel J. Larkin, a 20-year vet who heads up the bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center, taps online service providers to help pierce the Web's veil of anonymity and track down criminal hackers. Leads supplied by the FBI and eBay Inc. (EBAY ). A. James Melnick, 51, director of threat intelligence at iDEFENSE, a Reston (Va.) cybersecurity firm.
The FBI and Secret Service, which received jurisdiction over financial crimes when it was part of the Treasury Dept., have even formed a joint cybercrime task force in Los Angeles. Prosecutors are starting to make aggressive use of the Computer Fraud & Abuse Act, which carries penalties of up to 20 years in prison.
The ShadowCrew was like an eBay for the underworld and led by Andrew Mantovani who was a part-time student at Scottsdale Community College in Arizona and David Appleyard a onetime mortgage broker who lived in Linwood, N.J., just outside of Atlantic City. This was a case seen as a model for taking the battle to the Black Hats.  It was the first-ever tap of a private computer network under a 1968 crime act that set legal guidelines for wiretaps. "We became shadowcrew.com,"  says Nagel.  The bust yielded a treasure trove of evidence. So far the Secret Service has uncovered 1.7 million credit-card numbers, access data to more than 18 million e-mail accounts, and identity data for thousands of people including counterfeit British passports and Michigan driver's licenses. They say the ShadowCrew pillaged more than a dozen companies, from MasterCard Inc. to Bank of America Corp. (BAC ) The bust has yielded evidence against more than 4,000 suspects and links to people in Bulgaria, Canada, Poland, and Sweden. They can even shelter servers in a separate country, snarling the trail for investigators. Their favorite hideouts: Russia, Eastern Europe, and China.
A Russian gang called the HangUp Team allegedly based in Archangelsk, an Arctic Circle city, the alleged original members of the team, Alexei Galaiko, Ivan Petrichenko, and Sergei Popov, were arrested for infecting two local computer networks with malicious code, pummeling e-commerce web sites and taunting its pursuers for two years, police say. The gang plants software bugs in computers that allow it to steal passwords, and it rents out huge networks of computers to others for sending out viruses and spam. HangUp Team hides in plain sight. Its Web site --
rat.net.ru/index.php -- is decorated with a red-and-black swastika firing off lightning bolts. Its blog discusses hacker tactics and rails against Americans. Its motto: In Fraud We Trust. "We think we know what they've done, where they are, and who they are," says Nagel.   But authorities haven't been able to nab them so far. The Secret Service won't say why. The ShadowCrew allegedly had 4,000 members operating worldwide -- including Americans, Brazilians, Britons, Russians, and Spaniards. "Organized crime has realized what it can do on the street, it can do in cyberspace," says Peter G. Allor, a former Green Beret who heads the intelligence team at Internet Security Systems Inc. (ISSX ) in Atlanta.

FBI posts software to combat hacker attacks (US) February 10, 2000,
http://news.cnet.com/News/0-1003-200-1547115.html?dtn.head