The Islamic Insurgents (catch all)

[Dayuhan]

I only know what I've seen in the public accounts. Coverage here has been a bit more extensive but not much.

All the articles said the hackers were financed by a Middle Eastern Cell, and the hackers get commissions, so what is the motivation of the hackers to work for commissions instead of taking it all? The Saudi national appears to play a key facilitation role that actually is critical in the over all business scheme?

The question above is fairly obvious and I wondered about that too, but nothing in the published accounts explains it. Possibly the Saudi group was providing some target information or financial infrastructure that the Filipino group needed, but that's speculation. After all, how much "financing" is really needed to set this sort of thing up?

Here:

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/1...7AP06A20111127

It says:

Police in the Philippines said money from the scams was diverted to accounts of a Saudi-based group that was not identified.

So it's possible that the money was being bounced directly to accounts outside the Philippines by someone who subsequently paid the hack group their cut. They might have thought that would cover their tracks, but again that's speculation. From the same source:

Hackers broke into the phone systems of some AT&T customers and made calls to expensive international premium-rate services, according to a person familiar with the situation who was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Such scams are relatively common, often involving bogus premium-service phone lines set up across Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.

Fraudsters make calls to the numbers from hacked business phone systems or mobile phones then collect their cash and move on before the activity is identified. Telecommunications carriers often end up footing the bill for the charges.

That doesn't suggest that anything uniquely sophisticated was involved.

I've seen nothing addressing the question of whether the Filipino hackers were ideologically involved or just in it for the money.

The JI link is discussed:

Sosa said the Filipinos were being paid by a group originally run by Muhammad Zamir, a Pakistani arrested in Italy in 2007. He said Zamir was a member of Jemaah Islamiah, a Southeast Asian militant network with links to al Qaeda.

That sounds a little suspect, as JI is a SE Asian group and "members" would normally be from Indonesia or Malaysia. Zamir might have been a financier or link to Pakistani organizations, that isn't specified. It's always wise to be cautious about reading too much into these claimed links, and in any event Zamir has been in custody since 2007 and is cited only as a former leader of this shadowy Saudi group.

In short, both the JI and LeT connections remain alleged and a bit uncertain, very hard to put all of it together in any meaningful way without knowing a lot more.

It seems that all the news is coming from Philippine sources; the FBI isn't talking. It's not clear whether the FBI was involved because of the alleged terrorist connections or simply because a cyber-scam directed at Americans was traced back to the Philippines.

It's possible that this was a real saber-toothed terror finance scheme, also possible that it fell more toward the "crime" end of the terror-crime continuum, and the police here are playing up the terror connection to make themselves look more impressive. Maybe a little of both. More questions than answers, in any case.