By Kit Chellel for Bloomberg Business, 18 June 2015

Shakespeare-quoting hackers targeted British banks. Police led a global operation to stop the heist, but can they catch the Shylock gang?

ACT I: DISCOVERY

Gal Frishman scours the Internet looking for things most people try to avoid — malicious bits of software sent out to spy or steal. On Aug. 25, 2011, sitting at his desk in Tel Aviv, he found something he’d never seen before.

It was a banking Trojan, designed to sneak into a computer and drain your bank account. This one had peculiar survival instinct. It could hide or play dead, giving the impression it had been deleted only to re-install itself later.

“They had some really innovative stuff,” Frishman said. He got to work, thrilled to be the first malware researcher to lay eyes on a new species. Soon he noticed something even weirder. Broken fragments of Shakespeare, from The Merchant of Venice, were buried in the program files.

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