Salami Attack

In the salami technique, cyber criminals steal money or resources a bit at a time. a bank employee inserts a program, into the bank’s servers, that deducts a small amount of money (say Rs. 5 a month) from the account of every customer. No account holder will probably notice this unauthorized debit, but the  cyber criminal will make a sizable amount of money every month.

The classic story about a salami attack is the old ” collect-the-roundoff ” trick. In this scam, a programmer modifies arithmetic routines, such as interest computations. Typically, the calculations are carried out to several decimal places beyond the customary two or three kept for financial records. For example, when currency is in dollars, the round off goes up to the nearest penny about half the time and down the rest of the time. If a programmer arranges to collect these fractions of pennies in a separate account, a sizable fund can grow with no warning to the financial institution.

To quote an example, an employee of a bank in USA was dismissed from his job. Disgruntled at having been supposedly mistreated by his employers the man first introduced a logic bomb into the bank’s systems.