Anthony Scott Harrison, 21, from the Black Forest area near Adelaide, Australia, yesterday pled guilty to computer hacking. He admitted to infecting 3,000 computers with a banking trojan that allowed him to steal online bank account login details and credit card information. He also admitted to infecting a further 74,000 computers with a bot designed for DDoS.
Zeus is a prolific trojan that is designed to allow cyber criminals to break into corporate online banking accounts and allow criminals to transfer large amounts of money from company bank accounts.
A new version of the Zeus trojan has been detected that tries to steal Verified by Visa and Mastercard SecureCode passwords, allowing criminals to use corporate payment credit cards.
When users log into their online banking websites from infected computers, the new Zeus trojan will display a screen telling the user that they need to enroll their corporate credit card into the Verified by Visa security scheme. In reality, the criminals are stealing your data and can then use that to use your corporate credit card online illegally.
Mozilla has disabled a Firefox browser plug-in, Mozilla Sniffer, that steals your usernames and passwords and sends them to a third party website that cyber-criminals presumably use.
Police in Europe and the United States have arrested 178 people in 14 countries on charges of credit card fraud.
Apparently the investigation has found 120,000 stolen credit card numbers, and 5,000 cloned credit cards. Six card cloning labs have been seized.
Brian Krebs (krebsonsecurity.com) has posted an excellent blog post today. He’s even posted a picture of one of the credit card cloning labs, sourced from the Spanish Ministry of Interior.
Bank Info Security magazine today published an interview with Doug Johnson of the American Bankers Association (ABA) on the topic of corporate banking account takeovers by cyber criminals. Cyber criminals are increasingly using malware to steal online access to the bank accounts of small and medium sized companies and government agencies, and fraudulently transfer hundreds of thousands of dollars out of those accounts.
The interview is worth reading, and it can be found here.
When asked how big of a threat cyber criminal takeovers of Internet corporate banking accounts is, Mr. Johnson replied:
“Well, I think that the threat is very large. I think that the threat is not only a large one from the standpoint of the number of cases — which the FBI continues to observe are increasing for them. But I think the biggest risk that we face here, as it relates to the corporate account takeover, is the damage it does to the reputation of financial institutions and financial institutions’ customers, and the damage it does potentially to the relationship between our customers and our financial institutions. Because I do believe at the end of the day this is all about shared responsibility. Both financial institutions as well as financial institution customers do have a responsibility to have skin in the game to protect accounts, and I think that it is only through that active partnership that they were able really to address the current threat.”
The United Kingdom’s Information Commissioner’s Office has warned organisations that they need to minimise the risk of mistakes, as the number of reported data breaches exceeds 1,000.
An ICO report revealed that 254 breaches were as a result of information being disclosed in error, 307 were as a result of stolen data or hardware and 233 due to lost data or hardware.
David Smith, deputy commissioner at the ICO, said: “We all know that mistakes can happen but, the fact is that human error is behind a high proportion of security breaches that have been reported to us. Extra vigilance is required so that people’s personal information does not end up in the wrong hands.
“Organisations should have clear security and disclosure procedures that staff can understand, properly implement these and ensure that they are being followed by staff. Staff must be adequately trained not just in the value of personal information, but in how to protect it.
“We are keen to work with organisations to prevent breaches happening in the first place and to help ensure that things are put right when they do go wrong.”
A new report was released by the Anti-Phishing Working Group, rat the Sao Paulo Brazil “Counter Electronic-Crime Operations Summit”.
The report is titled “Global Phishing Survey: Trends and Domain Name Use 2H2009″. It is focused on an analysis of domain name registrar abuse, and how fraudulently registered domain names are used to operate phishing scams as well as malware and crimeware distribution.
In the second half of 2009, the “Avalanche” cyber crime gang appears to have been responsible for two-thirds of all phishing attacks launched in the second half of 2009, and was responsible for the overall increase in phishing attacks recorded across the Internet.
The Avalanche gang appears to be a group, perhaps largely of the same people, that has taken over from the notorious “Rock” phishing gang. The Rock phishers were the most prevalent online crime gang in the 2007-2008 period. They invented technology to automate phishing, spam and malware attacks by coordinating the compromise, operation and cleanup of thousands of servers across the Internet. The Rock phishing gang invented the “Fast Flux” technique of rotating phishing and malware sites across a given domain name, but on hundreds of servers, so that takedown of these sites was extremely difficult, and only having a domain registrar or registry suspend the domain could guarantee a takedown. This made approach effectively defeated blacklisting techniques for protecting users from visiting known phishing and malware distribution sites.
The Avalanche gang appears to have taken the approach to a new level. They continue to use large numbers of domain, and they use subdomain hosting services. But they are now using botnets, running on computers of consumers who do not realize that their computers are infected, and are in fact being used at night time by cyber criminals to perform their evil tasks.
The Avalanche gang is not only using this massive infrastructure for phishing, but they have been also using it to distributed malware and crimeware, notably the Zeus banking trojan.
The US Federal Bureau of Investigation is planning a major prosecution to bust up the operations that cyber criminals use to turn funds stolen online into readily available cash, a top bureau official said Tuesday.
The FBI is targeting the end of the criminal supply chain—the “money mules” who receive transfers of stolen funds in their banks accounts—to raise public awareness and dissuade people from becoming mules, said Patrick Carney, acting chief of the FBI’s Cyber Criminal Section.
Money mules are people who think they have a legitimate work-at-home job, where they receive goods or get money wired into their bank accounts, and their job is to forward the goods or a portion of the funds, to another person. These scams are usually presented as a work-from-home shipping clerk job, or perhaps a business consultant or an accounting administrator.
These jobs are posted on job boards like Monster.com and HotJobs.com They are sent out by spam. They are advertised online and even in newspapers.
But the reality is that these are scams, and are operated by the cyber underground as a way to launder stolen funds or goods purchased online with stolen credit cards.
We do not know how many people are working as “mules”, but it must be ten thousand or more in the USA. The anti-money-laundering website BobBear.co.uk lists hundreds of active fake companies that are fronts for money mules.
ICT Review has published Dave Tripier’s article: “How Cybercriminals Are Stealing Corporate Funds, and Putting Pressure on the Global Banking System”.
“The last eighteen months have delivered some of the most testing challenges to the global banking system. Whilst financial institution and businesses alike both struggle to emerge from a brutal recession, they’re now having to face up to a new threat which can potentially steal away their funds and corporate reputation with the simple click of a mouse.
In this article Dave Tripier, CMO of IronKey, explains how organised cyber crime rings have begun to target corporate banking transactions – and offers valuable advice to help banks and businesses to deal with this new threat.”
Financial Services Technology magazine has published my new article, “The 21st Century Trojan War”. In it I talk about the new corporate banking trojan threats, and how the cyber-underground is advancing their attacks against the financial services infrastructure by infiltrating the computers of finance professionals inside corporations and government agencies.
“In 2009, organized cyber crime rings began to shift away from massive phishing attacks against consumer banking users, and instead target bigger fish – corporate banking users. The cybercriminals use advanced malicious software (malware) to attack the computers of finance professionals in companies and government agencies. If a computer that is used to access a commercial online banking services becomes infected, the attackers can effectively take over the corporate financial accounts in real time by hijacking active banking sessions, and issue commands for funds transfers.
Symantec detected over 70,000 variants of the Zeus Trojan in 2009.
Documented losses to corporate banking customers from fraudulent wire transfers initiated in the USA by next-generation malware on corporate computers have ranged from $10,000 to over $1,000,000 per incident. Much of this money was successfully transferred to ‘money mule’ accounts overseas, and was never recovered. It is far more lucrative for cyber criminals to make numerous $9000 transfers from a single corporate bank account, than to try to hijack thousands of consumer-based accounts and make small money transfers. It is also reasonable to expect that online corporate banking fraud will track historical online consumer banking fraud patterns, and will grow dramatically over the next several years.”
Read the rest of the article at: Financial Services Technology Magazine.
