this full report comes out tomorrow but joining us tonight is chris doggett. director of kaspersky north america, he joins us from boston. f chris, thank you for being with us. first i want to ask you, how did you discover this? >> well, we first got involved in investigating karbanak when a bank in kiev called us up, they discovered an external connection to a the server in china, which shouldn't be there, and they knew they needed help so we sent in a forensics team. >> that is the malware you are talking about. chris, are american banks involved? >> we think that there may bee american banks involved, yes. we do see target ip addresses from the hacker servers to institutions in the u.s. >> you are not releasing the names of the banks involved, but this is a lot of money. why no names? >> well, it is an ongoing operation, that is to say the attackers are still currently stealing money from the banks, there are obviously law enforcement investigations that are active and underway in multiple countries, multiple jurisdictions, and we do not want to compromise

. >> reporter: chris doggett is managing director for kaspersky lab, the computer security firm thated the scheme. >> your very basic hackers are about getting in and stealing whatever they can get their hands on. the way these guys are different is they were a combination of hackers, spies and thieves. >> reporter: the criminals often used the simplest of methods to get into wants, an e-mail attachment with a virus sent the bank employees. when the employee kicked on it, the hackers gained access to the bank's financial system, and then spied to see how the employees and the systems worked. >> they went in and actually chained -- changed the balances in accounts, so it looked to the bank that there was more money than there was in reality. they then used e-payment systems and atm machines and even the swiss financial network to transfer the money out of those accounts into other accounts that they had set up for themselves. >> reporter: often the hackers sent commands to atms to just spew out money. they would have a person standing there to collect it. the losses are huge. one bank