It’s difficult to chronicle a battle in which neither side wants to admit publicly that he is fighting for his life, or indeed that he has even launched attacks against his enemy. But such is the nature of a business-feud-turned-turf-war that is now playing out slowly between bosses of two of the Internet’s largest illicit pharmacy operations.
An organized crime group thought to include individuals responsible for the notorious Storm and Waledac worms generated more than $150 million promoting rogue online pharmacies via spam and hacking, according to data obtained by KrebsOnSecurity.com.
In October, I showed why Java vulnerabilities continue to be the top moneymaker for purveyors of “exploit kits,” commercial crimeware designed to be stitched into hacked or malicious sites and exploit a variety of Web-browser vulnerabilities. Today, I’ll highlight a few more recent examples of this with brand new exploit kits on the market, and explain why even fully-patched Java installations are fast becoming major enablers of browser-based malware attacks.
A malware-laced e-mail that spoofed seasons greetings from The White House siphoned gigabytes of sensitive documents from dozens of victims over the holidays, including a number of government employees and contractors who work on cybersecurity matters, KrebsOnSecurity.com has learned.
The attack appears to be the latest salvo from ZeuS malware gangs whose activities over the past year have blurred the boundaries between online financial crime and espionage, by stealing financial data and documents from victim machines. This activity is unusual because most criminals using ZeuS are interested in money-making activities – such as stealing banking passwords and creating botnets – whereas the hoovering up of sensitive government documents is typically associated with threats from China that are deployed to gather industrial or military intelligence.
In early 2000 — ages ago in Internet time — some of the biggest names in e-commerce were brought to their knees by a brief but massive assault from a set of powerful computers hijacked by a glory-seeking young hacker. The assailant in that case, known online as Mafiaboy, was a high school student from a middle-class suburban area of Canada who was quickly arrested after bragging about his role in the attacks.
It wasn’t long before the antics from novice hackers like Mafiaboy were overshadowed by more discrete attacks from organized cyber criminal gangs, which began using these distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) assaults to extort money from targeted businesses. Fast-forward to today, and although vanity DDoS attacks persist, somehow elements in the news media have begun conflating them with the term “cyberwar,” a vogue but still-squishy phrase that conjures notions of far more consequential, nation-state level conflicts.
In any given week, I read at least a dozen reports and studies, but I seldom write about them because their conclusions either are obvious or appear slanted toward generating demand for specific products and services. Occasionally, though, a report… Read More »
Microsoft Corp. today warned Internet Explorer users that attackers are exploiting a previously unknown security hole in the browser to install malicious software. The company is urging users who haven’t already done so to upgrade to IE8, which it said includes technology that makes the vulnerability much more difficult to exploit.
The man arrested in Armenia last week for allegedly operating the massive “Bredolab” botnet — a network of some 30 million hacked Microsoft Windows PCs that were rented out to cyber crooks — appears to have generated much of his clientele as a key affiliate of Spamit.com, the global spamming operation whose members are blamed for sending a majority of the world’s pharmaceutical spam.
Chatter in the hacker underground suggests that certain elements within that community have conspired to end development of the infamous ZeuS banking Trojan, and to merge its code base with that of the up-and-coming SpyEye Trojan. This Web Fraud 2.0. acquisition appears to be a bid to build a more powerful e-banking threat whose sale is restricted to a more exclusive group of crooks.
Microsoft Corp. today warned that it is seeing a huge uptick in attacks against security holes in Java, a software package that is installed on the majority of the world’s desktop computers. In a posting to the Microsoft Malware Protection… Read More »
