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SpyEye Poses Risk To Banking Defenses
Financial institutions are facing more trouble from SpyEye, a piece of malicious software that steals money from customers online bank accounts, according to new research from security vendor Trusteer.
SpyEye is a dastardly piece of malicious software: it can harvest credentials for online accounts and also initiate transactions as a person is logged into their account, literally making it possible to watch their bank balance drop by the second.
In its latest versions, SpyEye has been modified with new code designed to evade advanced systems banks have put in place to try and block fraudulent transactions, said Mickey Boodai, Trusteer’s CEO.
Banks are now analyzing how a person uses their site, looking at parameters such as how many pages a person looks at on the site, the amount of time a person spends on a page and the time it takes a person to execute a transaction. Other indicators include IP address, such as if a person who normally logs in from the Miami area suddenly logs in from St. Petersburg, Russia.
SpyEye works fast, and can automatically and quickly initiate a transaction much faster than an average person manually on the website. That’s a key trigger for banks to block a transaction. So SpyEye’s authors are now trying to mimic — albeit in an automated way — how a real person would navigate a website.
Hackers Breach WordPress Servers
April 15, 2011 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Hackers have gained access to several servers that support WordPress and may have obtained source code, according to the founding developer of Automattic, the company behind the popular blogging platform.
Matt Mullenweg wrote on the WordPress blog that Automattic has been reviewing log records to determine how much information was breached and re-evaluating “avenues to gain access.”
“We presume our source code was exposed and copied,” Mullenweg wrote. “While much of our code is open source, there are sensitive bits of our and our partners’ code. Beyond that, however, it appears information disclosed was limited.”
Microsoft Delivers Massive Security Updates
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Microsoft today patched a whopping 64 vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, Internet Explorer (IE), and other software, including 30 bugs in the Windows kernel device driver and one in IE that was exploited at the Pwn2Own hacking contest last month.
The company also delivered a long-discussed “backport” to Office 2003 and Office 2007 that brings one of the newer security features in Office 2010 to the older editions.
The 17 updates, which Microsoft dubs “bulletins,” tied a record set late last year, but easily beat the October 2010 mark for the total number of flaws they fixed. Altogether, today’s updates patched 64 vulnerabilities, 15 more than in October and 24 more than in the former second-place collection of December 2010.
Nine of the 17 bulletins were pegged “critical,” Microsoft’s highest threat ranking, while the remainder were marked “important,” the next-most-serious label.
Microsoft and virtually every security expert pegged several updates that users should download and install immediately.
“There are three we think are top priorities,” said Jerry Bryant, group manager with the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC), in an interview earlier today. Bryant tagged MS11-018, MS11-019 and MS11-020 as the ASAP updates.
Tablets Likely to Transmit Sensitive Data
March 15, 2011 by admin
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Forty-eight percent of U.S. tablet device owners have used them to transmit all kinds of sensitive data, according to a survey released recently by Harris Interactive and FuzeBox.
Considering the explosive increase in tablet computer adoption, this is not entirely shocking news, but it should give pause to business owners and IT professionals. Sometimes without the explicit blessing of the company, employees are increasingly using tablets to answer work email and conduct day-to-day business. Read More…
Hackers Go After WordPress
March 6, 2011 by admin
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We found out Bloggers using the WordPress platform was shutdown by a DDos attack yesterday that apparently affected many blog sites.The DDos hostilities began in the morning and lasted for a couple of hours. The estimates on the DDos attack was thought to be “multiple Gigabits per second and tens of millions of packets per second”, according to sources, WordPress is working with their providers to prevent such acts from ever taking place again.WordPress the attack is over, though in Chicago, Dallas and San Antonio. The good news is that the site is back up. However, while the attack was in progress sources say it was on of the “largest” the organization has ever seen. Even centersThe attack unfortunately hit main three data. Read More…..
‘Ransomware’ Malware Threats Increasing
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A particularly nasty type of attack named”ransomware” is on the rise, with antivirus vendor Symantec seeing at least three new variants appearing in recent months. Such attacks often use viruses to not only steal a person’s sensitive or financial information, but also to disable hard drives and demand money to restore them.
“Threats that use extortion can be some of the most aggressive and, in some cases, offensive viruses encountered,” said Symantec security researcher Gavin O Gorman in a blog post.
Unfortunately for computer owners, attackers continue increase the sophistication levels of their ransomware. For example, GPCoder.G, which first appeared in November 2010, is a small (only 11 kilobytes ) piece of malware which, if executed, searches a hard drive for files with specific extensions, relating to everything from videos and Microsoft Office files to images and music. It then encrypts the first half of all files found, using a symmetric RSA encryption algorithm and a random key. The random, private key is then encrypted using a public key. “Without the private key from this key pair, it is not possible to obtain the symmetric key in order to decrypt the files,” said O Gorman.
To get the private key, the ransomware victim must forward the encrypted symmetric key to attackers, who decrypt and return it. Unfortunately, aside from restoring the encrypted files from a backup, “there is no way to bypass this technique,” he said. Read More….
Mobile Phone Security Threats On The Rise
February 11, 2011 by admin
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Mobile phone security threats rose sharply last year as the growing popularity of Internet-enabled mobile devices like smartphones and tablets provided new opportunities for cybercriminals, security software maker McAfee said.
In its fourth-quarter threat report, released on today, McAfee said the number of pieces of new cellphone malware it found in 2010 rose 46 percent over 2009’s level.
“As more users access the Internet from an ever-expanding pool of devices -computer, tablet, smartphone or Internet TV- web-based threats will continue to grow in size and sophistication,” it said.
McAfee, which is being acquired by Intel for $7.68 billion, said it expected PDF and Flash maker Adobe to remain a favorite of cybercriminals this year, after it surpassed Microsoft in popularity as a target in 2010.
It attributed the trend to Adobe’s greater popularity in mobile devices and non-Microsoft environments, coupled with the ongoing widespread use of PDF document files to transfer malware. Read More….