London's Metropolitan Police Service has revealed a sophisticated attack on a bank today. A gang of criminals plotted to remotely control a PC within a Santander branch in Southeast London by fitting it with a transmitting device. Disguised as a maintenance engineer, a fraudster attached a KVM, typically used to share a keyboard and mouse with multiple PCs, to a computer within the branch that would have enabled the gang to access the machine remotely. Reuters reports that the plot was foiled by police and no money was at risk.

It's not clear exactly what type of KVM was used, but given the attack's remote nature it would have been capable of capturing exact keyboard and mouse signals alongside a stream of the video output from the PC. The Metropolitan Police have arrested 12 suspects, aged between 23 and 50, in connection with the attempted fraud, and searches have been carried out in a number of properties across London. The sophistication of the attack isn't unheard of, with banks being the primary target for criminals, but they're still extremely rare. In 2005, a gang attempted to steal millions from the Sumitomo Mitsui Bank in the city of London by using maintenance staff that plugged devices into keyboards to intercept keystrokes. Similarly, that attempt was also foiled.