French President a Victim of Identity Theft

I am in Las Vegas for the McAfee Focus ’08 conference, and I just heard that French President Nicolas Sarkozy suffered, in September, a case of online bank fraud on one of his personal accounts.

Authorities said hackers were not aware of the identity of the owner of the account. We know only that they removed small amounts of money (an anonymous well-informed source told Agence France Press it was for opening mobile phone accounts). Perhaps by taking small amounts the crooks wished to ensure the validity of the stolen information and wished to verify the victim’s lack of concern. But they couldn’t have picked a worse target. The entire French police force is chasing them.

It is difficult to imagine my president as victim of phishing, but anybody can be attacked by crimeware while browsing the Internet via a not well protected computer. Remember, it is not necessary to visit inappropriate web sites to catch malware. In December 2007, for example, I explained in this blog that the site of the French embassy in Libya was affected by an IFRAME injection.

The most probable origin of Sarkozy’s identity theft is “carding.” As I wrote in May, dump tracks lists are for sale by the thousands, and many hacked credit card readers are on the market. Perhaps one of them involved Sarkozy’s credit card during one of his numerous foreign travels.

Relating to this fraud, Luc Chatel, secretary of state for consumer affairs, said there has been a 9 percent increase in Internet banking crimes this year in France.