Kingpin
Kingpin is a much overused word - especially someone who couldn't be bothered to mask his real IP number or encrypt his drives.
A villain at the heart of an organized crime network that stole £840k ($1m) from victims' online bank accounts has been jailed. Tomasz Skowron, 29, of Meredith Road, Worthing, England, was sent down for five years and three months on Monday at Croydon Crown Court, after pleading guilty to conspiracy to defraud, fraud, and …
I would gladly help anybody, but people like this don't listen. He got caught via his bad bank transactions and timing, the IP address just lightly tied him to some of the related crimes. In other words, he would have been caught in any number of ways, most of which do not involve his home computer. That faux pas could have easily been avoided.
The people he performed his miracle "MITM" attack on don't sound savvy either. Where there are easy marks, there will be script "kiddies" to foist their vulns on. Not bothering to test for, and mitigate, stray data is an afterthought at best. I guess Kingpin == Kiddie
We have learned almost nothing.
Is this a serious tech site or the Daily Fail. A man-in-the-middle attack is when a malicious entity inserts itself between an encrypted two way communication such as it can masquerade as either legitimate party. I thought 'money laundering' was taking the proceeds of someone elses drug business and er .. laundering the money and taking a cut. Look it, you can't use your own bank account and home IP address and still be kingpin of an organized crime network.
No, sorry, man-in-the-middle is any kind of attacks where you route traffic that should be go to and from two endpoints through a third you control to inspect and/or modify it, encrypted or not encrypted. Good encryption is actually a way to render a MITM attack useless, unless the attacker is in a position to break or remove encryption. Actually, encryption itself was mostly born to make the "man in the middle" (i.e. the courier who had to dispatch the message), unable to understand it.
" I thought 'money laundering' was taking the proceeds of someone elses drug business..."
That is the conventional meaning: however, you are pretty much committing a money laundering offence when you are a) a criminal, and b) using a bank. Or on a bad day just b).
In this case when you are have mules to withdraw the cash it's not even a stretch to add that as a charge.