Alleged Phishers Who Targeted eBay Employees Arrested

Romanian officials have arrested three men suspected of phishing some 3,000 eBay employees for their user names and passwords, according to published reports.

The men -- Liviu Mihail Concioiu, 22; Vladut Nnicolae (a.k.a "Calu"), 24; and Ardelean Calin Pavel, 25 -- reportedly waged the phishing attacks, according to a report on the site Internet Scammers. The attacks began last year.

The suspects used the stolen credentials to access internal eBay files, including a database of eBay clients and their transactions. Concioiu, the alleged ringleader, is suspected of setting up phishing sites in order to hack into the accounts of about 1,200 eBay users, according to the Associated Press.

Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics at the University of Alabama, blogged today that the attackers were able to successfully steal the credentials of six of the 3,000 eBay employees. "We don't know how many gave up their passwords, but the criminal only tried to use six of them. The VPN site he was imitating was protected with a two-factor authentication solution, so any passwords gathered had to be used immediately due to the rotating 'secureId' style token," Warner wrote in his post.

The men withdrew some $400,000 from Italian bank accounts. eBay worked with Romanian and U.S. authorities on the case for over a year, and Romanian police used search warrants at the homes of four other suspects in the case.

Meanwhile, eBay released this statement about the case: "The Romanian authorities' arrest of Liviu Mihail Concioiu and his conspirators is a great victory in the global fight against Internet fraud. eBay's internal investigations team has been working closely with Romanian and U.S. law enforcement on this investigation since May of 2009, and we are confident that the evidence will link these individuals to a series of online attacks and organized criminal activity."

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