Huge Phishing Attack On Emissions Trade In Europe 114
bratgitarre writes "A targeted phishing scam on companies trading with greenhouse gas emission certificates in Europe has reaped millions, Der Spiegel reports. By sending phishing e-mails to companies in Australia and New Zealand purporting to be from the German Ministry for Environmental Protection (German article, Google translation) the criminals obtained login credentials for companies owning polluting permissions. They then swiftly sold them to other polluters in various European countries. Damages are probably huge for a single incident, as 'one medium-sized German company alone had lost allowances worth €1.5 million ($2.1 million).' German federal officials, who can trace some of the transactions, claim that out of 2000 certificate sellers, seven responded to the scam."
Re:Is it only me (Score:3, Informative)
Neither is allowing externalities to go unaccounted for.
Re:Is it only me (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Is it only me (Score:4, Informative)
You are ranting about free markets. Cap and trade is the government using a market to help put a value on regulatory certificates. It is a market.
Amazing (Score:1, Informative)
The really amazing thing about this is that, on the one hand, people in a position of being able to handle hundreds of thousands of Euros and more are still falling for an old chestnuts like phishing emails (7 out of about 2000 companies involved) and the other that the whole system, at least if TFA (in the German version) is to be believed, doesn't even use the most basic of security measures like even TANs - all needed by the phishers seems to have been the good old user name/pasword combination. If that's true then it makes it look as if utter idiots (on both sides) are running this and I guess there will be a number of guys having to rely their golden parachutes.