New E-Banking Trojans Target Android Users
The security firm Trusteer reports that new Web-based attacks are targeting Android smartphone users in a campaign to circumvent two-factor sign-on features used by many banks to protect account holders.
Malware
DNSChanger FAQ: The Internet Is Not Broken
You know things have gone sideways when NPR and local TV news are talking about the “Internet doomsday” or “Black Monday”. We have DNSChanger to thank for this latest bout of Internet paranoia, and there’s a ton of misinformation and craziness circulating about the malware. We’re here to provide some actual information, luckily for you.
DarkComet RAT Flames Out
The author of DarkComet, one of the more notorious remote administration tools in use today, has said that he is ending development and sales of the tool after finding out that DarkComet was used by the Syrian government in attacks against anti-government activists.
If you’ve been scanning the headlines or watching the evening news, you may have heard that tens of thousands of Internet users in the U.S. – hundreds of thousands around the world – will be cut off from the Internet on Monday, July 9, after servers set up at the bequest of the U.S. government go dark. That’s bad, right? Well, maybe not.
Venture funded startup CrowdStrike has launched a new platform that will allow security researchers to work collaboratively to reverse engineer and analyze malicious code.
Followers and supporters of Tibetan Buddhist leader the Dalai Lama were the targets of an e-mail borne attack that used news of the spiritual leader’s birthday to trick recipients into installing a surreptitious monitoring program on their computers.
A new Trojan that uploads users’ phonebooks to a remote server is making the rounds, circulating on both Apple’s App Store and the Google Play marketplaces, according to research by Kaspersky Lab posted on the Securelist web site earlier today.
Here’s the good news on America’s birthday: the last year has seen the U.S. emerge as an undisputed global leader in the use of offensive cyber operations. Averting another “Sputnik” moment, the nation’s longest running and most successful democracy blazed new trails in non-kinetic warfare, effectively ending speculation that the world’s lone superpower was asleep at the wheel as nations like China and Russia dashed ahead in the cyber realm. Now for the bad news: we’re screwed.
A new version of the Sykipot Trojan is being pushed to unsuspecting users in a wave of online attacks, including targeted attacks on attendees of an international aerospace conference, according to researchers at the security firm AlienVault.
Attackers really like exploit kits because they offer users the ease of point-and-click exploitation, lots of potential targets and don’t require a huge amount of technical knowledge to use. Attackers also enjoy Microsoft vulnerabilities, especially unpatched ones, because of the massive installed base, and at least some of the users of the Black Hole exploit kit have begun using the exploit for the critical MSXML vulnerability in their attacks.
