Cigarette Smuggling and Cyber Security: Low-Tech Crimes Fund High-Tech Threats

You may not connect the cheap cigarettes sold under the counter (or out of a trunk, bodega or by a street vendor) with the mysterious charges on your credit card that you don’t remember making or the cash that has, somehow, just disappeared from your bank account. You also may not connect that website selling cheap cigarettes made in second and third world countries with Shellshock or whatever the fashionably scary cyber-threat of the day is when you’re reading this. But the Russian mafia and other Transnational Criminal Organizations and Foreign Terrorist Organizations understand the connections quite well. Criminals around the world know that tobacco trafficking is a lucrative, low risk way of raising cash that can be used to fund narcotics deals, arms smuggling, human trafficking and, more recently, the theft of credit card and banking data.

 

 

http://www.circleid.com/posts/20141002_cigarette_smuggling_cyber_security_low_tech_crimes_fund_high_tech/