Tag Archives: RSA

Zeus Trojan Author Ran With Spam Kingpins

February 17, 2012
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The cybercrime underground is expanding each day, yet the longer I research this subject the more convinced I am that much of it is run by a fairly small and loose-knit group of hackers. That suspicion was reinforced this week when I discovered that the author of the infamous ZeuS Trojan was a core member of Spamdot, until recently the most exclusive online forum for spammers and the shady businessmen who maintain the biggest spam botnets.

Thanks to a deep-seated enmity between the owners of two of the largest spam affiliate programs, the database for Spamdot was leaked to a handful of investigators and researchers, including KrebsOnSecurity. The forum includes all members’ public posts and private messages — even those that members thought had been deleted. I’ve been poring over those private messages in an effort to map alliances and to learn more about the individuals behind the top spam botnets.

Chasing APT: Persistence Pays Off

October 27, 2011
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The IT director for an international hedge fund received the bad news in a phone call from a stranger: Chinese hackers were running amok on the fund’s network. Not seeing evidence of the claimed intrusion, and unsure of the credibility of the caller, the IT director fired off an email to a reporter.

“So do you think this is legit, or is the guy trying to scare us?” the IT director asked in an email to KrebsOnSecurity.com, agreeing to discuss the incident if he and his company were not named. “He has sent me the logs for the connections to the infected server. I checked the firewall and am not seeing any active connections.”

Court: Passwords + Secret Questions = ‘Reasonable’ eBanking Security

June 8, 2011
126 Comments

A closely-watched court battle over how far commercial banks need to go to protect their customers from cyber theft is drawing to a conclusion. Experts said the decision recommended by a magistrate last week — if adopted by a U.S. district court in Maine — will make it more difficult for other victim businesses to challenge the effectiveness of security measures employed by their banks.

In May 2009, Sanford, Maine based Patco Construction Co. filed suit against Ocean Bank, a division of Bridgeport, Conn. based People’s United Bank. Pacto used online banking primarily to make weekly payroll payments. Patco said cyber thieves used the ZeuS trojan to steal its online banking credentials, and then heisted $588,000 in batches of fraudulent automated clearing house (ACH) transfers over a period of seven days.

In the weeks following the incident, Ocean Bank managed to block or claw back $243,406 of the fraudulent transfers, leaving Patco with a net loss of $345,445. Because the available funds in Patco’s account were less than the total fraudulent withdrawals, the bank drew $223,237 on Patco’s line of credit to cover the transfers. Patco ended up paying interest on that amount to avoid defaulting on its loans.

Patco sued to recover its losses, arguing in part that Ocean Bank failed to live up to the terms of its contract when it allowed customers to log in to accounts using little more than a user name and password. On May 27, a magistrate recommended that the court make Patco the loser by denying Pacto’s motion for summary judgment and grating the bank’s motion.

RSA Among Dozens of Firms Breached by Zero-Day Attacks

May 4, 2011
46 Comments

The recent data breach at security industry giant RSA was disconcerting news to the security community: RSA claims to be “the premier provider of security, risk, and compliance solutions for business acceleration” and the “chosen security partner of more than 90 percent of the Fortune 500.”

The hackers who broke into RSA appear to have leveraged some of the very same Web sites, tools and services used in that attack to infiltrate dozens of other companies during the past year, including some of the Fortune 500 companies protected by RSA, new information suggests. What’s more, the assailants moved their operations from those sites very recently, after their locations were revealed in a report published online by the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Advanced Persistent Tweets: Zero-Day in 140 Characters

May 3, 2011
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The unceasing barrage of targeted email attacks that leverage zero-day software flaws to steal sensitive information from companies and the U.S. government often are characterized as ultra-sophisticated, almost ninja-like in their stealth and anonymity. But according to expert analysis of several recent zero-day attacks – including the much publicized break-in at security giant RSA — the apparent Chinese developers of those attack tools left clues aplenty about their identities and locations, with one actor even Tweeting about his newly discovered vulnerability days in advance of its use in the wild.

RSA and others have labeled recent zero-day attacks as the epitome of an “advanced persistent threat” (APT), a controversial term describing the daily onslaught of digital assaults launched by attackers that are considered to be highly-skilled, determined and have a long-term perspective on their mission. Because these attacks often result in the theft of sensitive and proprietary information from the government and private industry, the details surrounding them usually become shrouded in secrecy as law enforcement and national security officials swoop in to investigate.

But an investigation of some of the open source information available on the tools used in recent attacks labeled APT indicates that some of the actors involved are doing little to cover their tracks, and that not only are they identifiable, but that they’re not particularly concerned about suffering any consequences from their actions.

Revisiting the SpyEye/ZeuS Merger

February 3, 2011
28 Comments

In October 2010, I discovered that the authors of the SpyEye and ZeuS banking Trojans — once competitors in the market for botnet creation and management kits — were killing further development of ZeuS and planning to fuse the two malware families into one supertrojan. Initially, I heard some skepticism from folks in the security community about this. But three months later, security experts are now starting to catch glimpses of this new hybrid Trojan in the wild, as the author(s) begins shipping a series of beta releases that include updated features on a nearly-daily basis.

Fun with ATM Skimmers, Part III

May 7, 2010
44 Comments

ATM skimmers, or devices that thieves secretly attach to cash machines in order to capture and ultimately clone ATM cards, have captured the imagination of many readers. Past posts on this blog about ATM skimmers have focused on their prevalence and stealth in attacking cash machines in the United States, but these devices also are a major problem in Europe as well.

Researchers Map Multi-Network Cybercrime Infrastructure

March 17, 2010
32 Comments

Last week, security experts launched a sneak attack against Troyak, an Internet service provider in Eastern Europe that served as a gateway to a nest of cyber crime activity. For the past seven days, unnamed members of the security community reportedly have been playing Whac-a-Mole with Troyak, which has bounced from one legitimate ISP to the next in a bid to reconnect to the global Internet. But experts say Troyak’s apparent hopscotching is in fact the expected behavior from a carefully architected, round-robin network of backup and redundant carriers, all designed to keep a massive organized criminal operation online should a disaster like the Troyak disconnection strike.