Attacks Possible on Stock Market and Bank Web Sites
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The government issued the alert Thursday, but said the threat by a radical Muslim group was unconfirmed and seemed to pose no immediate danger.
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Five advisories issued by security firm Secunia warn that a pop-up attack could expose users to phishing scams on most Web browsers.
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Separate actions target penny stock promoters and hackers who allegedly broke into stock trading accounts.
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(Source: MessageLabs) The "pump 'n' dump" stock scam has been around a long time. Learn how Internet criminals are perfecting it. Plus, see how one particular scam originated from a simple e-card, and how it played out for thousands either with or without the superior protection of the MessageLabs Web Security Services solution.
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A vulnerability in AOL's instant messenger could allow attacks. Also: A new Bagle variant rumbles across the Net.
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A bank that guarantees its online users safety and security has direct evidence that its Web-based banking system is not bullet-proof. Should that bank tells its users?
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Dec 10, 2004: A new web browser security hole has been uncovered by a security firm, which could provide scammers with the means to launch phishing attacks from pop-up windows on genuine, trusted websites.
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At Yahoo's finance site, stock quotes update automatically and continually, the numbers flashing green and red as prices rise and fall. Wall Street investors can easily leave a single Web page up all day.
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Spotting the clues to buy before stocks rise.
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Blog: Although rare, a sophisticated attacker could perform a man-in-the-middle attack using Google Desktop.
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Protect your portfolio from these destructive forces.
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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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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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(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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Apparently it&#39;s not just unwary individuals that fall victim to online scammers. Even large corporations, it seems, can get suckered into parting with their money by devious&#160;phishers.Case in point: Eden Prairie, MN.-based grocery chain Supervalu, which earlier this year got conned into depositing more than $10 million into two fraudulent bank accounts before recognizing the ruse. Details of the case are contained in court documents filed in connection with two forfeiture cases stemming from the incident.According to federal court filings in the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho, the fraudulent activity took place in late February and early March this year. In the court filings, Stephen Kilgroff, Supervalu&#39;s vice president of legal affairs, said that on February 26 and 28 the company received two separate e-mails, one purporting to be from an employee at American Greetings Corp. and the second from an employee at Frito-Lay, both company-approved vendors.Both e-mails told Supervalu to send future payments for each vendor to new bank account numbers. In the case of the e-mail that purported to be from American Greetings Corp., Supervalu was advised to send payments to an HSBC account in Miami. The other e-mail advised Supervalu to send Frito-Lay payments to an account at First Security Bank in Rogers, Arkansas.Between Feb 28 and March 3, Supervalu deposited just over $6.5 million via multiple wire-transfers to the HSBC account, thinking that it was sending the money to American Greetings Corp. Similarly, on March 2 it made eight separate wire-transfers to the bank in Arkansas, depositing a total of $3.6 million to an account it thought belonged to Frito-Lay.In addition to the $6.5 million deposited by Supervalu into the HSBC account, an additional amount of $500,000 had been deposited into the same account by a second company, identified as &quot;ROHM&quot; on court documents. No information has been available concerning the second company, and it is not a party to subsequent litigation.Around March 6, according to the filings made by Kilgroff, Supervalu discovered that it had been &quot;induced&quot; into making the transfers to the bogus accounts. Following the discovery of the fraud, Supervalu quickly notified the appropriate law enforcement authorities, who managed to recover nearly all of the money before it could be withdrawn from the accounts.The recovered money is now being claimed by Frito-Lay, American Greetings and Supervalu. In making the claim to the recovered money, Frito-Lay said that it believes the money belongs to Supervalu and said supported that company&#39;s claim to ownership of the misdirected funds.&quot;However to the extent there is any determination that the ownership of these funds changed from Albertsons/Supervalu [the Albertsons grocery chain was recently acquired by Supervalu] to Frito-Lay (as a result of the attempted transfer, the misdirection, or any other development) Frito-Lay makes this claim to these funds in the alternative and subject to any claim of ownership by Albertsons/Supervalu&quot; the company said in an affidavit.A federal judge is expected to rule sometime in November on which firm should receive the recovered funds.A spokeswoman from Supervalu responded via e-mail to a request for comment. &quot;As indicated by the forfeiture complaint filed by the U.S. Attorney&#39;s Office in Boise, Supervalu was the target of attempted financial fraud,&quot; spokeswoman Haley Meyer said. &quot;Due to our internal controls and processes, we were able to quickly discover and report this to the FBI. As a result of the quick work of the Boise FBI Office and the U.S. Attorney, any funds lost are minimal.&quot;Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.&#160;
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The banking industry warns online customers to guard against a new wave of sophisticated cyber-fraud.