Digital bank robbers make off with $6.7 million
During the holidays cybercriminals kept themselves busy, hacking websites and stealing all the data they could find. South African Postbank, a financial institution owned by SA Post Office, is one of the victims.
South African bank Postbank was robbed of $6.7 million earlier this month. But the thieves didn’t need masks and guns to pull off the job — just computers.
To pull off the heist, the hackers created a backdoor into one of the bank’s computers. From that hacked computer, they were able to access the rest of the network and issue the commands to distribute the $6.7 million to different accounts owned by the thieves. Those accounts were promptly emptied via ATM visits. Preliminary reports revealed that the cybercrime ring responsible for the theft opened a number of Postbank accounts all across the country and then, in the period between January 1 and January 3, they managed to access a Post Office employee’s computer from where they deposited money from other accounts into their own.
Since the crime didn’t raise any red flags with its automated fraud-detection programs, bank employees failed to notice the money was missing until the bank re-opened after the New Year’s holiday.
The irony is that 3 years ago the institution invested a large amount of money in their anti-fraud systems. However, as we can clearly see, anti-fraud systems aren’t worth much if the company doesn’t have a strict policy for the way their employees handle computers.
If the reports are true, then it is very likely that an employee with privileged rights must have fallen victim to a scam email designed to spread a malicious Trojan.
Fin24 reports that the National Intelligence Agency, which offers assistance when a government institution is compromised, has launched an investigation to precisely determine the causes that allowed for the incident to occur.
Bank representatives state that none of their customers are affected by the breach, but security experts believe that Postbank’s systems desperately need an upgrade.
Crooks don’t necessarily have to hack into a bank’s systems to gain access as it may be much easier to manipulate someone into handing over some information that can be utilized to just waltz in without being detected.
Lately, we’re presented with many cases in which a little bit of social engineering can perform much more efficiently than even the most sophisticated piece of malware. Take the thieves who stole 9 million dollars from payroll debit cards issued by RBS Worldpay.
AT&T iPad site hacker to fight on in court

A hacker facing trial on charges that he and a cohort conspired to break into an AT&T Web site for 3G iPad users told CNET today that he will fight the charges “to the end.”
Andrew “Escher” Auernheimer, 26, was indicted several months ago on one count of conspiracy to gain unauthorized access to computers and one count of identity theft. He faces up to 10 years in prison and $500,000 in fines. Co-defendant Daniel Spitler pleaded guilty in June and a judge put the case on hold, reportedly because of plea negotiations.
But Auernheimer, whose hacker handle is “weev,” says he’s not going to cop a plea.
“I did not fold the two previous times when the FBI tried to frame me as a terrorist” for allegedly calling in a bomb threat to a synagogue, which he denies, he said in an e-mail. “I will not fold now when they try to libel me as a thief. My indictment conveys a message that I am some sort of identity thief.”
In a follow-up phone interview, Auernheimer said he has done “nothing ethically wrong” and is being persecuted for “telling the truth” by exposing a security hole in AT&T’s Web site that was leaking e-mail addresses and unique device numbers for about 120,000 3G iPad users last year, including government and high-profile corporate customers.
“I contend there is no crime in telling the truth or using AT&T’s, or anybody’s, publicly accessible data, to cite it to talk about how they made people’s data public,” he said. “There’s a continuance until January. There may be a trial then…I just want to fight this thing to the end.”
A Department of Justice spokesman declined to comment because the court case is pending.
Asked his thoughts on Spitler’s guilty plea, Auernheimer said he was sure that Spitler would “cooperate in some way.” “I don’t blame him. He’s a good guy,” he said of his former hacking partner. “It’s probably terrifying for most people to go through this process. I’ve been fighting ‘The Man’ for years.”
Spitler wrote a script called the “iPad 3G Account Slurper” and used it against AT&T servers to harvest the iPad user data. The Justice Department contends that he and Auernheimer plotted on how to take advantage of the security hole for profit, but Auernheimer claims they were merely trying to protect consumers and waited until AT&T knew about the hole and fixed it before allowing Gawker to publish the details.
“I’ve never once made a dime off embarrassing a large corporation. I’ve never attempted to make a dime and AT&T is basically a public figure that is open to criticism. I think it’s fair,” he said. “Embarrassing somebody by telling the truth is not malice. It’s necessary speech.”
The Justice Department has released excerpts of Internet Relay Chat (IRC) logs in which the hackers discussed selling the e-mail addresses to spammers, shorting AT&T stock before releasing details of the breach, and destroying evidence.
In one exchange, Auernheimer writes: “This could be like, a future massive phishing operation serious like this is valuable data we have a list a potential complete list of AT&T iphone subscriber emails,” to which Spitler responds: “ipad but yeah.” Asked to comment about statements from the logs that would appear to be damaging to his case, Auernheimer said “It’s easy to misconstrue a true statement as evidence of malice…our acts reveal no malice. I went straight to the press and I told exactly what needed to be told.”
When asked why he didn’t go directly to AT&T first, he said: “AT&T has a commercial interest in not having their negligence with consumer data spoken about, ever…I used the press as a proxy and I waited for (AT&T) to patch before going public.”
Auernheimer, 26, said he is barred from using IRC, communicating with anyone in his hacking group or any potential witnesses or co-defendants, and doing random Web browsing, but can use the Internet for “commerce.”
He was forced to leave his Fayetteville, Ark., home because of a bail condition requiring him to stay in the jurisdiction, he added, and as a result, he is living in Jersey City, N.J. (Meanwhile, drug charges he was arrested on last year after an FBI sweep of his home in the AT&T case have been dropped, he said.)
He has a public defender and has raised about $10,000 for his legal defense fund, he said. While he waits for trial, he is learning the Erlang programming language and is “open to security work.”
“I definitely have a habit of pissing people off. I’m not apologetic for that,” said the self-described Internet “troll.” “I think that the people that get pissed off probably deserve it. It serves a social function.”
The New Reality of Stealth Crimeware
Anyone who has been in information security recently knows that it has gotten easier for cybercriminals to build stealth crimeware. The malware we deal with on a regular basis grows ever more difficult to find, while high-end targeted attacks such as Stuxnet and other advanced persistent threats (APTs, the abbreviation I hate) are using ever more advanced rootkit techniques to avoid detection.
Cybercriminals use clever stealth techniques to evade detection because it allows their malware to be more effective, live on a machine or network longer, and thus maximize the compromise. McAfee Labs is now at the point where we detect more than 110,000 new unique rootkits per quarter.
To make matters worse, there is another issue that many fail to recognize:
Today’s current OS-based security model is not adequate; cybercriminals know how to get past these defenses every time.
The security industry has to find a new vantage point on cybercriminal behavior to stop and uncover their stealth techniques. It is time for our industry to start looking at security beyond the operating system to gain a more effective view of how cybercriminals operate.
We delve into these and many other issues in our latest report: “The New Reality of Stealth Crimeware,” written by myself and Thom Sawicki of Intel. Download it here.
Introduction
Stealth is the art of travelling undetected, of being invisible. Stealth technology allows military aircraft,
Ninjas, and malware to sneak up on the enemy to launch an attack, gain intelligence, or take over
systems and data.
Although stealth techniques are used in sophisticated attacks like Conficker and Operation Aurora, the
Stuxnet attack offers a new blueprint—and benchmark—for how committed criminals can use stealth
techniques to steal data or target computing systems. Stuxnet innovations included a combination of
five zero-day vulnerabilities, three rootkits, and two stolen digital certificates. Powerful toolkits, like what is available in the Zeus Crimeware Toolkit, make stealth malware development a “point- and-click” endeavor, no longer restricted to the most knowledgeable programmers. While there are no definitive industry figures, McAfee Labs estimates that about 15 percent of malware uses sophisticated stealth technique to hide and spread malicious threats that can cause significant damage.1 These attacks form the cornerstone—the “persistent” part—of advanced persistent threats (APTs).
Data Privacy Weather Report – News Roundup for 2011

Data privacy is on the firing line this year with Fortune 500 companies in the scope. It’s been a long shot year with the proliferation of organized crime, its merger with global communications, and further development of horizontal markets to sustain profitability.
alternatives. We’ve designed Dropbox to protect user data against
threats of all kinds, but we’ve focused on helping users avoid the most
common threats: not having current backups, not having any backups at
all, accidentally deleting or overwriting files, losing USB drives with
sensitive information, leaving files on the wrong computer, etc.”
or behind an electric gate, you don’t need to worry that somebody
might attach a tracking device to it while you sleep. But
the Constitution doesn’t prefer the rich over the poor; the man
who parks his car next to his trailer is entitled to the same privacy
and peace of mind as the man whose urban fortress is
guarded by the Bel Air Patrol. The panel’s breezy opinion is
troubling on a number of grounds, not least among them its
unselfconscious cultural elitism (shwing!).
.
2011 Guardian Analytics – Commercial Banking Fraud (SMB)
Online Bank Fraud Continues To Plague Small Businesses, Study Says
Responses to the February 2011 survey from more than 533 SMBs indicate that money continues to be siphoned unnoticed from business accounts at an alarming rate and SMBs are leaving their institutions at alarming pace because of it. This means financial institutions are facing a lose-lose proposition: losing money and losing customers.
Business banking fraud — particularly in small and midsize companies — is still causing major problems for both the businesses and the banks that serve them, according to a study published today.
The “2011 Business Banking Trust Study,” a follow-up to a similar study conducted last year, was written by Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Guardian Analytics. This year’s numbers suggest that the banking fraud situation has not improved since 2010.
“The industry has not moved the needle in addressing the corporate account takeover and fraud plaguing SMBs and their financial institutions,” the report states. “The data shows that fraud is still pervasive, money is leaving accounts unnoticed at an alarming rate, and businesses will leave their banks because of it.”
Fifty-six percent of businesses experienced fraud in the past 12 months, according to the study. Of those that experienced fraud, 61 percent were victimized more than once. Seventy-five percent of the victims experienced online account takeover and/or online fraud. These figures are nearly the same as last year’s, the researchers say.
In 78 percent of fraud cases, banks failed to catch fraud before funds were transferred out, according to the study. Banks were able to keep money from leaving the bank in 22 percent of the cases and fully recover fraudulently transferred funds for 10 percent of businesses.
Banks were unable to recover funds in 68 percent of cases, leading to losses for both business and banks, Ponemon says. Banks took the losses in 37 percent of cases by reimbursing businesses for unrecovered funds; businesses took losses in 60 percent of cases.
Forty-two percent of respondents in the study said they do not believe the bank would cover any losses if their companies’ assets were stolen and not recovered. Despite this attitude, 70 percent of businesses still think their institution should be ultimately responsible for securing online accounts.
Forty-three percent of businesses said they have moved their banking activities elsewhere after a fraud incident. Ten percent of businesses that have experienced fraud have terminated their banking relationships following fraud attacks. Thirty-three percent said they did not fully terminate their relationship, but moved their primary cash management services to another institution.
2011 Business Banking Trust Study (PDF)
Who’s viewing Infostruction this month?

Total Unique Visitors Polled: 10,126
7 Continents, 71 Countries, 294 cities.
New Visitors: 82.72%
78.7% of users running Windows.
56% of users running Firefox.
44% of users running Internet Exploder. (Oops, Explorer)
Total Unique Referrers 6329 (Web Searches, Links etc..)
Total Unique User Agents: 394 (Provided by Browsers)
Countries (in no specific order):
Seychelles, Bulgaria, Seychelles, Moldova, Russian Federation, Germany, Australia, France, Czech, India, Luxemborg, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Italy, Netherlands, Japan, UK, Mexico, Dominican Republic, New Zeland, Sri Lanka, Israel, Singapore, Austria, Brazil, Denmark, Yemen, Canada, US, Rwanda, Portugal, Poland, Malaysia, Finland, Japan, Ukraine, Argentina, Respublic of Serbia, China, Greece, Romania, Hong Kong, Great Britan, Spain, Colombia, Nepal, Slovak Republic, United Arab Emirates, South Africa, Georgia, France, Vietnam, Philippines, Norway, Morocco, Singapore
Ethiopia, Armenia, Poland, Lebanon, Taiwan, Spain, Netherlands, South Korea, Moldova, Peru, Belgium., Nepal.
Visiting sources of interest:
National Aeronautics And Space Administration
Internal Revenue Service
Central Intelligence Agency
Dod Network Information Center (Washington, DC)
Cybernet (Switzerland)
National Center For Supercomputing Applications
Australian Department Of Finance
City Of Los Angeles
City of Fort Collins
Civil Air Patrol
Central Africa Building Society
Japan Network Information Center
State of Illinois
Goldman Sachs Company
Deutsche Telekom
Quality Pontiac-GMC
Bahrain Telecommunication Company
Advanced Decision Systems
Bank of America
Ironkey
Nike Inc
Emc Corporation
Microsoft Corp
Oracle Corporation
Cisco Systems
At&t Services
Oxford Networks
Hewlett-packard Company
Internode (AZ)
Mid-atlantic Corporate Federal Credit Union
The Industrial Bank Of Taiwan Co., Ltd.
Queen’s University
Minnesota State Colleges And Universities
Arkansas State University
Sacred Heart Hospital
Alaska State Government
Middle East Technical University (Turkey)
Massachusetts Institute Of Technology
Telefonica O2 Germany Gmbh & Co.
Duke University
Texas A&M University
University Of Texas, San Antonio
UMass Boston
University of Florida
Miami Dade College
Queen’s University (Canada)
Dell Kace Secure Browser Tool – Freeware Security Tool for Firefox 3.6

The Dell Kace Secure Browser tool is said to use a kind of re-direction so that browser activity is shifted to an alternate area of the computer to isolate and contain harmful code. The 10MB security software, available for download from Dell’s Kace site, is based on the current Firefox browser and Adobe Flash and Reader Plug-Ins. Dell’s application is integrated with a STAND ALONE version of Firefox 3.6 which can
operates identical to the regular Firefox browser.
The security tool also lets the user create what are called whitelists and blacklists of Web sites allowed to be visited. In a managed environment, the Dell Kace browser security software can be included as a managed application with the Dell Kace K1000 v5.1 Management Appliance, typically used in mid- to large enterprises.
Dell Security Tool – Virtualizing the Browser Against Security Threats
Download Kace Secure Browser (Runs on Seperate Firefox)
Malware being sent in job applications
If you’re in any kind of business there’s a good chance you have to deal with resumes on a daily basis, especially if you’re a manager or Human Resources professional. While you probably delete that Viagra ad and ignore the promise of Nigerian riches, when a resume hits your inbox, you read it.
Spammers know this and have been increasingly presenting Malware as if it were a resume, hoping that the recipient will be so curious about a potential applicant that they open or run something that they shouldn’t. This practice of using rigged document files goes back to the early 2000′s where exploits for Microsoft’s document format existed even before Office 2000.
Let’s not forget when we could encoded Malware into a MIME header or .eml file and make IE/Outlook execute it… without even opening it. ![]()
These waves of Malware use obfuscation and “dropper” payloads to avoid detection. A dropper serves only to pull a payload, and a backdoor down for Botnet control. It rarely is detected as malicious because of its simple nature. The Antivirus products may continuously delete the Malware payloads, but as time passes with the dropper alive and well. The Malware creators are given the opportunity of changing the package and evading detection.
The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) is reporting that businesses have received Bredolab variants in email attachments masquerading as job applications.
“Recent FBI analysis reveals that cyber criminals engaging in ACH/wire transfer fraud have targeted businesses by responding via e-mail to employment opportunities posted online,” IC3 said in a news release.
They also said: “The FBI recommends that potential employers remain vigilant in opening the e-mails of perspective employees. Running a virus scan prior to opening any e-mail attachments may provide an added layer of security against this type of attack. The FBI also recommends that businesses use separate computer systems to conduct financial transactions.”
It’s called “spear phishing” – malicious code sent specifically to someone in a company who would be expecting that type of email (job applications in attachments in this case.)
“Recently, more than $150,000 was stolen from a US business via unauthorized wire
transfer as a result of an e-mail the business received that contained malware. The
malware was embedded in an e-mail response to a job posting the business placed on
an employment website and allowed the attacker to obtain the online banking credentials
of the person who was authorized to conduct financial transactions within the company.
The malicious actor changed the account settings to allow the sending of wire transfers,
one to the Ukraine and two to domestic accounts. The malware was identified as a
Bredolab variant, svrwsc.exe. This malware was connected to the ZeuS/Zbot Trojan,
which is commonly used by cyber criminals to defraud US businesses.”
“Anyone who believes they have been a target this type of attack should immediately
contact their financial institutions and local FBI office, and promptly report it
to the IC3′s website at www.IC3.gov. The IC3′s
complaint database links complaints together to refer them to the appropriate law
enforcement agency for case consideration. The IC3 also uses complaint information
to identify emerging trends and patterns.”





















