In February of 2005, a Miami man sued Bank of America for not adequately protecting him against a $90,000 fraudulent wire transfer to the Parex Bank in Latvia. Joe Lopez was the first online user to sue his financial institution for not protecting his assets from a computer hacker.

Lopez, owner of a computer and copier supply business, accused Bank of America of negligence and breach of contract for not alerting him in advance to the existence of a piece of malware known as "Coreflood" prior to April 6, 2004, when the alleged theft took place.

Shortly after the wire transfer occurred, a sum of $20,000 was withdrawn from Parex by unknown individuals, according to the complaint filed in court. The remaining $70,000 was, however, frozen by Latvian banking authorities. Bank of America has since settled this case; neither side has revealed the terms.

"I had probably heard the news about Joe Lopez, but (until recently), I hadn't thought twice about the whole Coreflood episode of a few years ago," admitted Joe Stewart, director of Malware Research at SecureWorks, when I spoke to him at last summer's Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

In particular, Stewart recalled hearing that the U.S. Secret Service had found evidence of Aflood or Coreflood on the Lopez computer.

"The Secret Service actually named Coreflood. That was very surprising. Normally, we don't get the final tally. We don't know who's account got stolen. It's very unusual to actually have a victim that is public, and everybody knows exactly what (was) taken."

Unlike a lot of bots and botnets, most of which exist primarily to relay spam, Stewart said Coreflood has a different agenda: "Its goal is to steal the data directly from users." The much more popular Storm botnet, he said, is more of a nuisance. "Coreflood has a real financial impact for people like Joe Lopez."

Who's behind Coreflood? Stewart declines to say, but in an interview in The New York Times, he suggested that the gang responsible was based somewhere in Russia. He would not tell me the name of the group because of ongoing criminal investigations.

This information was found on the Cnet site. Click the link to read the full article and videos.