Indian bank site restored after malware attack
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(InfoWorld) - The web site of Bank of India, one of India's leading banks, was restored early Tuesday. The bank had closed the site on Friday after it found that the site had been hacked, and was dispensing malicious code. Sunbelt Software Inc., a provider of security software in Clearwater, Florida, had on Thursday alerted users on its blog that the bank's site had been compromised, and advised them not to visit the site. Unidentified hackers had inserted malicious code into the bank's main web page, a senior employee familiar with the situation said on Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity. The bank's designated spokesman on this issue was not immediately available for comment. As a result, persons coming to the bank's web site were likely to be temporarily redirected to another site where Trojans and other malware were downloaded onto their computers, the employee said. The user was then brought back to the bank web-site. The bank's IT staff thought they had the situation under control Friday morning, until they found that each time they changed the index page for the web site, it was immediately replaced by the hackers. The bank then decided to bring the web site down. "The web site was hosted externally by a hosting company in the U.S.," the employee said. The bank has since changed the company hosting the service, though the employee clarified that the change in hosting provider had been on the cards even before the hacker attack. The attack on the web site did not however affect the bank's online banking operations, according to the employee. The bank's customers access online banking services through a link on the home page of the bank's web site. The online banking service is provided to users from well-protected servers hosted and monitored within the bank by Hewlett-Packard Co., the employee said. The bank is as yet not clear about the identity of the hackers, although Sunbelt suggested in its blog that it was a criminal gang, called the Russian Business Network (RBN). "We have called for the logs from the hosting provider in the U.S., and we may have some definite information then," the employee said.
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Malware was being deployed as a Trojan Horse that attempts to disable anti-virus programs, modify registry keys, download additional files, and log keystrokes when connecting to banking websites.
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A Chechen rebel website has reopened on the internet - three weeks after it was temporarily shut down by the authorities in Lithuania.
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Attackers continue to use well-worn techniques, such as SQL injection, to exploit holes in popular Web applications but have also moved on to other targets, including government sites, and newer exploit methods, such as cross-site request forgery, according to the latest report filed by the Web Applications Security Consortium.The nonprofit industry group released the findings of its annual Hacking Incidents Database report this week, and despite the fact that cyber-criminals are still capable of using familiar means like SQL injection to victimize e-commerce sites and other transactional systems, a growing number of assailants are broadening their efforts and capabilities and going after new sets of targets, the research contends.Based on WASC's in-depth investigations into roughly 80 individual attacks carried out during calendar 2007, the group concludes that data theft remains the primary goal of most incidents, representing 42 percent of all the events.Surprisingly, site defacement -- thought to be a dying art in the world of profit-driven hacking -- actually still accounted for 23 percent of the attacks covered in the report, followed by exploits aimed at planting malware on sites at roughly 15 percent.And while the lion's share of the incidents studied by the group revolved around the attempted theft of sensitive data that could be sold on the underground market or used to carry out fraud, the phishing threats of years past are increasingly becoming outnumbered by attacks that utilize malware code hidden on legitimate Web applications to victimize unsuspecting end-users, the group said.Of all the threats studied by WASC in its report, 67 percent were designed specifically to derive some form of profit -- pointing to continued growth in the professionalism of those responsible for the attacks, researchers said."One of the biggest issues is that so much of this activity is being delivered directly though legitimate Web sites that are being hacked," said Ryan Barnett, a project leader at WASC who also serves as director of application security training at applications firewall vendor Breach Security, which sponsored the 2008 report."It used to be that as long as users didn't go to certain Web sites they'd be safe, but obviously, that's changing," he said. "SQL injection still works surprisingly well, so we're seeing plenty of those across the board, but you do also begin to see more use of things like cross-site request forgery, to which even greater numbers of sites might be vulnerable."SQL injection, which attempts to use security vulnerabilities occurring in the database layer of applications to compromise them, still remains a weak point in some widely-used Web systems, in particular e-commerce sites, a reality that the researcher views as surprising based on the well-established history of the technique. However, CSRF threats, which attempt to hijack authenticated Web sessions to carry out their ploys, are becoming more common, while still far less frequent than SQL injections, according to the expert. Indeed, CSRF threats accounted for only 2 percent of the incidents tracked by WASC for the 2007 report, while SQL injections represented 20 percent, the most popular format for exploit.Unintentional information disclosure, which involves sites that emanate such detailed authentication failures that hackers may use them to find a way in, was the second most popular format for attackers to break into applications at 15 percent, followed by cross-site scripting exploits, which use malware planted on legitimate sites to subvert end-users' machines, at 12 percent of the incidents.In terms of the types of organizations being assailed by the attacks tracked by WASC, the group found that government agencies actually represented the largest group of targets.Perhaps because financial services companies and retailers have improved their applications defenses, hackers have moved on to the government set as well as educational institutions, the report contends.Some 29 percent of the incidents covered in the report targeted government agencies, followed by education at 15 percent, and retailers and media outlets tied at 12 percent.In addition to attempts to steal data, WASC contends that government agencies may also be getting hacked by parties looking to embarrass or disable the organizations' sites based on ideological goals. Because government agencies are forced to report more of their security incidents publicly, hackers may merely be trying to force the organizations to admit that they have been exploited in public, the researchers said.
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(InfoWorld) - Users of online banking sites tend to bypass critical clues that the integrity of those sites may have been compromised, according to the working draft of a study released on Sunday by researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The study, which will be formally released in May at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in Oakland, California, underscores how new technologies and warnings can't completely protect Internet users fromÂ scams such as phishing. It also throws doubt on the effectiveness of site-authentication images, which have been implemented by financial institutions such as Bank of America, Vanguard Group, and ING Bank. The images, selected by the customers, are shown when a bank customer logs in from a different computer than is normally used. The study involved 67 users, with more than 90 percent under 30 years old. Because of varying parameters in the study, not all qualified to be included in the results for each of the three tests. Users were ask to conduct common online banking tasks, although precautions were taken to ensure users weren't put at risk. For the first test, HTTPS indicators -- which show that an encrypted connection is enabled -- were removed from the address bar along with the lock that appears in the bottom right corner of Internet Explorer 6. Although the absence of HTTPS indicators should be a warning, all 67 participants continued with their transactions, the study found. The researchers then conducted a test where the site-authentication image was removed along with the HTTPS indicators. The researchers wrote it is the first empirical investigation into site-authentication images. Only two of 60 people chose not to log in when the image was removed, a key sign that a site may have been tampered with or is a phishing site, the study said. Of users who were actually using their own bank account for the study, 23 of 25 continued to enter their passwords. "We find them [site-authentication images] to be ineffective," the study concludes. In the last test, researchers made it more obvious, this time replacing a password-entry page with a warning page from Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3. The page advises of a problem with the security certificate of the chosen Web site. Despite the warning, 30 of 57 users entered their passwords. The study comes as U.S. banks are beefing up their authentication technologies amid new requirements from federal regulators. In October 2005, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) mandated that U.S. banks implement stronger authentication protections by the end of last year, particularly for high-risk transactions such as sending money to a different person's account. Bank of America uses site-authentication image technology called SiteKey. Users pick an image and assign a phrase to it while also setting three "challenge" questions. If a user logs in from a computer that doesn't already have a cookie, they're asked one of the challenge questions and then to verify the image and phrase. If the image doesn't appear or the phrase is wrong, consumers shouldn't proceed. Bank of America said the image system benefits users since it's free and doesn't involve extra hardware or software.
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(InfoWorld) - A Republican Party Web site has been hacked, and for some time it has been spreading a variation of the long-running Storm Trojan horse to vulnerable visitors, a security researcher said Friday. This is the first time that Storm has taken to the Web for its victims, said Dan Hubbard, head of research at San Diego-based Websense. "The big news is that Storm has added infecting sites to its arsenal," said Hubbard. Storm debuted in January but only cracked the top malware lists early this summer, and has become infamous for its ability to adapt its infection strategies. "They have a knack for latching onto the latest newsworthy events and capitalizing on the public interest in them," Symantec researcher Hon Lau said last month. "And if no newsworthy events are happening at the time, then they will just make them up." Until now, Storm has infected users via files attached to e-mail or through links embedded in spam. The change noticed by Websense's scanners, however, means that Storm's backers have moved to other attack vectors -- in particular, compromised Web sites that sport malicious IFRAMEs. Users visiting such sites are instantly infected with the Trojan if their browsers are not patched against whatever exploit the IFRAME code is throwing out. According to Hubbard, several hundred sites have been compromised by Storm's makers, then seeded with IFRAMES that can inject the Trojan into vulnerable PCs. One such site was a Republican Party Web site for the 1st Congressional District of Wisconsin. Within hours after Websense notified the site's owners, however, it had been purged of the dangerous IFRAME code. By mid-morning Friday, it was safe to visit. Hubbard did not know how the site was compromised. The motive behind Storm's continued attacks and its expansion into new areas like this, said Hubbard, is a never-ending appetite for bots -- compromised computers that can be used for spamming or other criminal activities either by the original attackers or by others who lease sections of the botnet. "Storm's botnet is clearly the biggest around," said Hubbard, who estimated its size as "conservatively, in the hundreds of thousands, although some people have thrown out numbers like 1 million or 2 million or even 4 million." Earlier this month, in fact, MessageLabs pegged the botnet at 2 million machines. In the last few weeks alone, Storm has spread through e-mails touting a real-time scoreboard site for National Football League games, spam hyping a Web site that wished Americans a happy Labor Day holiday, and more mail that used YouTube videos as bait. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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(InfoWorld) - An attack this week that targeted online customers of at least 50 financial institutions in the U.S., Europe, and Asia-Pacific has been shut down, a security expert said Thursday. The attack was notable for the extra effort put into it by the hackers, who constructed a separate look-alike Web site for each financial institution they targeted, said Henry Gonzalez, senior security researcher for Websense Inc. To be infected, a user had to be lured to a Web site that hosted malicious code exploiting a critical vulnerability revealed last year in Microsoft's software, Websense said. The vulnerability, for which Microsoft had issued a patch, is particularly dangerous since it requires a user merely to visit a Web site rigged with the malicious code. Once lured to the Web site, an unpatched computer would download a Trojan horse in a file called "iexplorer.exe," which then downloads five additional files from a server in Russia. The Web sites displayed only an error message and recommended that the user shut off their firewall and antivirus software. If a user with an infected PC then visited any of the targeted banking sites, they were redirected to a mock-up of the bank's Web site that collected their login credentials and transferred them to the Russian server, Gonzalez said. The user was then passed back to the legitimate site where they were already logged in, making the attack invisible. The technique is known as a pharming attack. Like phishing attacks, pharming involves the creation of look-alike Web sites that fool people into giving away their personal information. But where phishing attacks encourage victims to click on links in spam messages to lure them to the look-alike site, pharming attacks direct the victim to the look-alike site even if they type the address of the real site into their browser. "It takes a lot of work but is quite clever," Gonzalez said. "The job is well done." The Web sites hosting the malicious code, which were located in Germany, Estonia, and the U.K., had been shut down by ISPs as of Thursday morning, along with the look-alike Web sites, Gonzalez said. It was unclear how many people may have fallen victim to the attack, which went on for about three days. Websense did not hear of people losing money from accounts, but "people don't like to make it public if it ever happens," Gonzalez said. The attack also installed a "bot" on users' PCs, which gave the attacker remote control of the infected machine. Through reverse engineering and other techniques, Websense researchers were able to capture screenshots of the bot controller. The controller also shows infection statistics. Websense said at least 1,000 machines were being infected per day, mostly in the U.S. and Australia. Â
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After facing its first-ever phishing attack last week, Deutsche Bank AG said today it was the target of a renewed assault that began late yesterday and continued until this morning.
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TechWeb - Officials think the site's server was hacked sometime between Jan. 26 and Jan. 28.
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THE PROBLEM with phpBB software, which we reported on this time yesterday is over. And it&#39;s thanks to Google, it appears. F-Secure said that the Santy worm, which defaced web sites and used a Google search
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After putting its compromised site on blocks Friday to give IT staff time to get the better of a serious security breach, the Bank of India has restored its Web presence and says that the problem has been contained.
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InfoWorld - The Web site for Indian antivirus vendor AvSoft Technologies has been hacked and is being used to install malicious software on visitors' computers, security researchers said Thursday.
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A new computer virus is catching people out by coming back from the dead.
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Virus attack occurs just as PC vulnerability is discovered.
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This organization's IT security officer leaves and isn't replaced. A year and a half later, the organization suffers a Web page defacement and malware attack -- and no one is really surprised.
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The Banker-AJ trojan has been coded to lie dormant in the background on infected Windows PCs. When users visit legitimate online banking Web sites of certain UK banks, the malicious code is
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Google have fixed a phishing vulnerability that was discovered by Netcraft on Wednesday. Google notified Netcraft that they had closed the vulnerability today at 06:30 BST, making this less-than-two-days response