PHOENIX, June 18 (UPI) -- Hackers who may have links to Russian mobsters apparently have been stealing credit card numbers and other personal information from students from at least five college campuses in the United States.
The Arizona Republic reported Tuesday that 20-30 students were known to have been victimized by the hackers who use so-called keystroke recording software to secretly copy the numbers that an unwitting computer user types while checking on bank and credit card accounts over the Internet.
"I'm not aware that anyone has been defrauded here yet," Lt. John Sutton of the Arizona State University Department of Public Safety told the newspaper. "We are not ruling out the possibility that victims might trickle in -- or come in en masse."
The Secret Service has launched an investigation into the alleged plot and has seized the hard drives from 20 computers available for public Internet use at Arizona State. The probe has also led to student-access computers at unnamed colleges in California, Florida and Texas.
Arizona State officials said the hackers used keystroke software that was manually loaded into the terminals from a floppy disk and fed information to a computer in Russia. While the Russian mob is not known to have a particularly strong presence in Arizona, some reputed associates have been known to run insurance, identity theft and credit card fraud scams in the Phoenix area.
"We believe that they were here," Sutton said. "The word I got from the detective was it's a possible Russian mafia connection."
