Have German cops commissioned Skype-hacking Trojan?
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German police have long expressed interest in having surveillance tools that could crack Skype, but leaked documents seem to indicate that thanks to specially commissioned malware, they do indeed have ways of making your VoIP talk.
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Federal Trojan for 'online searches' Analysis Germany's police and secret services are pushing for a legal basis for "online house searches" â carried out without the knowledge of suspects, using spyware similar to a Trojan.â¦
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California police are probing if   computer hackers illegally downloaded a private taped   conversation of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger from state   computers, a spokesman said on Monday.
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Unknown DDoS tool, predecessors A deluge of Trojan-laced spam that slyly tricked recipients by promising information about winter storms ravaging Northern Europe last month was even more crafty than we thought.â¦
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Skype turned off a video-sharing feature in its software because it could be misused to launch a self-copying worm attack against Skype users, security researchers said today.
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German police have shut down an international phishing scam that may have cost victims hundreds of thousands of euros.
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An invitation to chat by Webcam could come with malicious code.
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(InfoWorld) - In a crackdown on Internet child pornography, German police detected several servers running a copy of Tor, a software designed to anonymize Internet usage. "We seized or blocked an undisclosed number of servers during a raid, which is still underway," Jens Gruhl, a spokesman for the public prosecutors office of Konstanz, Germany, said Monday. "A few of these computers had installed copies of Tor." Users of Tor software in the country, worried about an unexpected visit by the police, have decried the move in a flurry of blogs. "This situation is disturbing, really disturbing," wrote Alexander Janssen, from DÃ¼sseldorf, Germany,Â in a blog post. "I run a Tor server myself and the last thing I want to experience is the police kicking down my door [and] seizing my computer." Gruhl said German crime officials are not specifically searching for servers running Tor but for servers distributing child porn. "That fact that police discovered copies of Tor is coincidental, not intentional." In his blog, Janssen reckoned that the seized servers were configured to be so-called Tor "exit nodes," allowing their IP (Internet Protocol) addresses to show up in the server logfiles in question. Tor was created to defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that "threatens personal anonymity and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships and state security," according to the Web siteÂ www.tor.eff.org. The software bounces communications around a distributed network of servers, called onion routers, protecting users from Web sites that build profiles of their interests, local eavesdroppers that read data or learn what sites they visit, and even the onion routers themselves.
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Suspect computers off limits German police have been prohibited from using hacking tactics to obtain intelligence from suspects' computers.â¦
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Informants, seeking a reward from Microsoft, led police to the German student.
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Crackers Updates to Germany's computer crime laws banning so-called "hacking tools" have been criticised as ill-considered and counterproductive.â¦
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(InfoWorld) - A highly sophisticated spying operation that tapped into the mobile phones of Greece's prime minister and other top government officials has highlighted weaknesses in telecommunications systems that still use decades-old computer code, according to a report by two computer scientists. The spying case, where the calls of around 100 people were secretly tapped, remains unsolved and is still being investigated. Also complicating the case is the questionable suicide in March 2005 of a top engineer at Vodafone GroupÂ in Greece in charge of network planning. A look into how the hack was accomplished has revealed an operation of breathtaking depth and success, according to an analysis on IEEE Spectrum Online, the Web site of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The case includes the "first known rootkit that has been installed in an [phone] exchange," said Diomidis Spinellis, an associate professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business, who authored the report with Vassilis Prevelakis, an assistant professor of computer science at Drexel University in Philadelphia. A rootkit is a special program that buries itself deep into an OS for some malicious activity and is extremely difficult to detect. The rootkit enabled a transaction log to be disabled and allow call monitoring on four switches made by Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson within Vodafone's equipment. The software enabled the hackers to monitor phone calls in the same way law enforcement would, minus the required court order. The software allowed for a second, parallel voice stream to be sent to another phone for monitoring. The intruders covered their tracks by installing patches on the system to route around logging mechanisms that would alert administrators that calls were being monitored. "It took guile and some serious programming chops to manipulate the lawful call-intercept functions in Vodafone's mobile switching centers," the authors wrote. The secret operation was finally discovered around January 2005 when the hackers tried to update their software and interfered with how text messages were forwarded, which generated an alert. Investigators found hackers had installed 6,500 lines of code, an extremely complex coding feat. "The size of the code is not something that somebody could hack in a weekend," Spinellis said. "It takes a lot of expertise and time to do that." The investigation, which included a Greek parliamentary inquiry, netted no suspects, due in part to key data that was lost or destroyed by Vodafone, the authors wrote. It's not known if the hack was an inside job. Vodafone may have been able to discover the scheme sooner through statistical call analysis that could have linked the calls of those being monitored to calls to phones used to monitor the conversations, they wrote. Carriers already do that sort of analysis, but more for marketing than security. But the defense against rogue code, viruses and rootkits is complicated due to how telecom infrastructure has developed. "Complex interactions between subsystems and baroque coding styles (some of them remnants of programs written 20 or 30 years ago) confound developers and auditors alike," the report said.
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(InfoWorld) - Skype users are under attack from aÂ new wormÂ that spreads through the peer-to-peer Internet phone application'sÂ chat feature. The attack begins when a user receives an instant message containing a link from someone in their contact list or an unknown Skype user, said Villu Arak, a Skype spokesman based in Tallinn, Estonia. There are several versions of the chat messages, which are "cleverly written" to fool users, Arak wrote on the Skype heartbeat blog. The link appears to contain a JPEG photo file, but if clicked causes the Windows run/save dialog box to appear, which asks whether the user wants to save or run a ".scr" file. The file is malicious software that can then access a user's PC via Skype's API (application programming interface). The malicious file has been named W32/Ramex.A. "Users whose computers are infected with this virus will send a chat message to other Skype users asking them to click on a web link that can infect" their computers, Arak wrote. To avoid trouble, users should not download the file. At least two security vendors, F-Secure and Kaspersky Lab, have updated their software to detect the worm, Arak wrote. Instant message programs are another way hackers can try to gain control over PCs. Access to one person's instant messenger or e-mail account can mean contact details for many others, allowing hackers to use malicious e-mails or instant messages to lure victims into downloading malicious software. Â
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German police said they had exposed the names of thousands of users of illegal Internet piracy sites as part of a crackdown on swapping bootleg copies of movies, computer games, software and music.
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InfoWorld - Skype has been forced to turn off a video-sharing feature in its software because it could be misused to launch a self-copying worm attack against Skype users, security researchers said Tuesday.
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Some Skype users were left vulnerable to a possible worm attack Wednesday after company technicians failed to disable a buggy component of the network.Skype&#160;pulled the plug on its &quot;Add Video to Chat&quot; feature&#160;Tuesday after security researcher Aviv Raff reported that it suffered from a serious vulnerability. An attacker could create a self-copying worm program that could be used to&#160;install malicious software on victims&#39; machines&#160;and then go on to infect other Skype users.&quot;Add Video to Chat&quot; lets users pick videos from two sites -- Dailymotion.com and Metacafe.com -- and add them to their Skype chat sessions.Skype blocked access to these sites Tuesday after Raff&#39;s disclosure, effectively disabling the feature.But because of a misconfigured Skype proxy server, some users were still allowed to access the Metacafe videos, leaving them vulnerable to an attack, said Raff, who had been in discussions with Skype engineering staff over this issue.Because Raff has not publicly released his exploit code, the oversight probably doesn&#39;t pose a serious security risk for most Skype users, Raff noted.Skype expects to patch the underlying vulnerability sometime next week, said a spokeswoman for Metacafe. That&#39;s later than previously expected. On Tuesday, Metacafe said that a patch was due early Wednesday morning.Metacafe believes it&#39;s unlikely that an attacker could successfully exploit the flaw in a widespread attack, but with Raff&#39;s proof of concept code, a Skype user has to simply click on a maliciously crafted Web link in order to be infected.According to Raff, Skype uses a Windows Internet Explorer component with an inappropriate security setting. Instead of rendering HTML from the Internet with the more secure &quot;Internet Zone&quot; security setting, Skype uses IE&#39;s &quot;Local Zone&quot; security setting, usually reserved for more trustworthy content.Skype representatives did not return calls seeking comment for this story.
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A low-threat Internet worm is attacking Skype users worldwide.