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Hack your way to wealth?

In the old days, if you were a criminal that wanted to "get rich quick" you'd just get a few mates together and go rob a bank.

A couple of guns, a decent get-away car, some masks and a willingness to suffer a long time in jail if things went wrong were the only qualifications required.

Despite the obvious risks, bank robberies of this type have been an occasional occurrence but far more often than not, those who engage in such activities find themselves walled up for a good many years and given plenty of time to reflect on their poor choices.

But this is the 21st century -- you don't need guns to rob a bank and a little tech-savvy makes for a much quicker and more assured "get-away" than even the fastest car might do.

I suspect, especially in the light of events that transpired today, a new generation of gangster will be looking at the hi-tech options and carrying a broad smile at the prospects.

But I'm not talking about hacking into a bank and transferring huge amounts of cash into your own account. That's just a fool's game.

Anyone who tries such a crude theft will almost certainly be caught even more easily than those who brandish guns and escape in a cloud of tire smoke.

No, the *real* secret to making a fist-full of money out of hacking might be a whole lot simpler -- and even if you got caught, you'd likely even get to keep your ill-gotten gains (if you were clever).

So what am I talking about?

Well today, a hacker or hackers unknown managed to break into the twitter account of the Associated Press and after doing so, published a tweet which suggested that The White House in the USA had been bombed, leaving President Obama suffering unspecified injuries.

The immediate result of this news was that US financial markets plunged and stock prices rapidly fell.

All very interesting, you might think -- but how can this help you steal money?

Well it's pretty obvious that if you were the hacker (with decent financial backing from some larger criminal organisation perhaps), hacking a reputable media source and injecting such "bad news" into their news feeds, you could rapidly purchase plunging stocks at bargain prices -- in the full knowledge that the news was fake and they would very quickly recover.

Buy during the short window that existed after you "broke" the news to the world, then sell when the prices recovered after the story was found to be fake.

The percentages may be small but, so long as you've got enough financial backing, the profits could be huge.

And remember, if a hacker is "smart" enough, they'll leave only an obfuscated trail that even the most tech-savvy investigators will eventually find ending at an unsecured WiFi node somewhere.

Now I'm certainly not suggesting anyone do this and, to be honest, it's really only the type of crime that someone who already has large amounts of money and regularly trades in volume on the sharemarket could carry out.

But it is a crime that I believe will occur (if it hasn't already).

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