Lin Mun Poo of Malaysia sounds like a pretty bad-ass criminal hacker. He cracked into the Federal Reserve, and snagged hundreds of thousands of card numbers from a bank in Cleveland. But perhaps his intellectual skills don’t extend quite as far as they should for criminal survival.

The article describes how he was nabbed selling card numbers in Brooklyn a few hours after landing at Kennedy airport. If you’re a conspiracy nut, the following sentence might indicate the government has some secret master key to crack your encryption:

The stolen card numbers were found on his encrypted laptop after he was nabbed…

In our internal chat room, Dave Lewis thinks this was all a sting, and his computer was probably unlocked as he was showing off the numbers. Considering how fast they nabbed him, that’s my guess too. You sort of have to wonder why he came to the US in the first place, considering it’s easy to sell that stuff in underground markets, also supporting the sting theory.

But there’s one more interesting bit:

Poo has also confessed to breaking into networks of several international banks and a major Defense contractor, the complaint states.

Gee, I wonder when we’ll see those disclosures go out? Yeah, probably not.

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