Banking malware targets UK high street banks

Researchers report that cyber criminals have used spam servers to send 19,000 malicious emails to UK customers of Barclays, Royal Bank of Scotland, HSBC, Lloyds Bank and Santander in an attempt to steal bank login details.

Containing the Dyreza banking Trojan – also known as Dyre – the phishing emails pose as a follow-up email from a tax consultant, asking the user to urgently download an attached file in order to complete a financial transaction. A second email asks the user to attach files to verify financial and personal details, while a third email is also sent. Attached to the emails is an archive containing a malicious .exe file.

Dyre shares many similarities with the infamous Zeus malware. Catalin Cosoi, chief security strategist at Bitdefender describes the malware:

“It installs itself on the user’s computer and becomes active only when the user enters credentials on a specific site, usually the login page of a banking institution or financial service,” he continued, adding how “hackers inject malicious JavaScript code, allowing them to steal credentials and further manipulate accounts, all completely covertly.”

“If the user opens a banking web page, the malware will contact a malicious server and send it a compressed version of the web page. The server will then respond with the compressed version of the web page with malicious code added to it,” he said. “This altered web page is then displayed on the victim’s web browser. Its appearance remains exactly the same, but the added code harvests the victim’s login credentials”.

Phishing threat to businesses

Phishing emails are a major problem for companies, as staff are often unaware of the risks clicking on links or opening attachments from unknown senders.

It’s important to educate your staff so that they can spot and avoid phishing campaigns, significantly reducing the risk of a cyber attack on your organisation.

Five greatest cybersecurity myths

With the average cost of a data breach now sitting around $6.5 million in the US, businesses will be eagerly looking at how they can avoid being compromised.
With more interest in the industry than ever, we bust the top five myths surrounding cybersecurity:

Myth 1: Small organizations aren’t targeted by hackers
It’s a common misconception that hackers overlook small organizations and focus on large organizations only, but the truth is that virtually every web-based attack (98%) is opportunistic in nature, according to the 2015 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR).
In fact, because of this misunderstanding, small organizations tend to have inadequate levels of cybersecurity (more so than large organizations) and are actually an ideal target for hackers.
What’s worse is that 60% of small organizations that are compromised close down within six months.
Every organization – large and small – needs to strengthen its cybersecurity procedures.

Myth 2: It’s really expensive to be cyber secure and the ROI isn’t worth it
It’s true that being cyber secure costs money, but effective cybersecurity is actually a lot more affordable than people think, and considerably cheaper than suffering a data breach (now averaging $6.5 million).
It’s impossible to put an average cost on being cyber secure as every organization is different – in terms of size, resources, etc. – but organizations can implement ISO 27001, the internationally recognized cybersecurity standard, from as little as $659 with our packaged solutions.
In terms of return on investment (ROI), it’s hard to quantify the savings from an attack that didn’t happen, but the whole idea of cybersecurity is to decrease the costs related to security problems (i.e. incidents). If you manage to decrease the number and/or extent of security incidents, you will save money. In most cases, the savings achieved are far greater than the cost of the safeguards, so you will ‘profit’ from cybersecurity.

Myth 3: Cyber threats are a technology problem so a technology solution will fix them
Implementing the latest AlienVault solution may keep track of attacks or unusual activity, but it won’t get to the root of the problem.
It won’t prevent your staff from clicking on malicious links in emails, from letting a stranger through your organization’s front door, or from sending unencrypted customer data to someone outside the organization.
A comprehensive, holistic approach that covers your people, processes, and technology is the only real answer to achieving true cybersecurity, and ISO 27001 is the only internationally-recognized cybersecurity standard that addresses all of these three areas.

Myth 4: Hackers are your biggest threat
Reports show that your employees are in fact your biggest threat.
“Internal attacks are one of the biggest threats facing your data and systems,” states Cortney Thompson, CTO of Green House Data. “Rogue employees, especially members of the IT team with knowledge of and access to networks, data centers and admin accounts, can cause serious damage,” he says.
As well as disgruntled employees, you also need to be aware of careless or uninformed employees – those who mistakenly leave their work cell phone in a taxi, have weak passwords, or click on links in suspicious emails – and how your partners and suppliers are handling their cybersecurity. These all pose enormous security threats to your systems and data, and tend to be more insidious.

Myth 5: I don’t need cybersecurity – I have cyber insurance

Although cyber insurance seems like a fail-safe, simple way to tackle cybersecurity, it is often the opposite. Many cyber insurers include clauses stating that failing to implement basic cybersecurity measures will void your coverage, so it’s really important to check your policy carefully.
Insurance protection is just one of the ways to mitigate costs; you must also consider having an incident response plan and team in place, extensive use of encryption, business continuity management involvement, CISO leadership, employee training, board-level involvement, and other factors.

Kaspersky Spots Hackers within its Own Network

Kaspersky Lab in Moscow has discovered a strange thing inside its own network. A new nation-state sponsored attack has been linked to members of the Stuxnet and Duqu gang, with the hackers looking to siphon data from within Kaspersky’s own networks.

It was last year that the hackers penetrated and stuck around the networks, Kaspersky said. The attackers did this for a few reasons, according to Kaspersky.

1. To access and steal the gathered intelligence on nation-state attacks that Kaspersky has been investigating and looking into.
2. To understand how Kaspersky’s detection algorithms and software works, in order to navigate a way around them.

The discovery
Kaspersky has earned a reputation in exposing and thwarting plenty of nation state attacks including those such as Stuxnet, Flame, Gauss, Regin, Duqu and more. It was an inevitability that the attackers would settle on targeting Kaspersky eventually.

The breach was discovered when an engineer noticed irregular web traffic in the security firm’s servers while testing a new product developed by the company. Upon investigating further, it was discovered that a dozen systems were also infected.

The Hack and the malicious toolkit
With similarities to the 2011 Duqu hack, the attackers are believed to be the same group behind the creation of the spyware – Duqu. The original attack comprised of six modules and the sharing of an algorithm and plenty of similar coding to hide the malware in plain sight. The new attack however, dubbed as Duqu 2.0 by Kaspersky, is a tremendous 19 mega-byte toolkit that’s rooted with plugins for clandestine recon work as well as data theft tasks. Three zero-day exploits were used as well, in order to stealthily extract data from a remote location and ping to communicate with infected machines.

“The entire code of this [attack] platform is some of the best we have seen ever,” said Costin Raiu, director of the Kaspersky’s Global Research and Analysis Team. “It is incredibly well written. Almost no mistakes anywhere.”

The infiltration of the infection
Here’s how precise the infection and attack was:

• The first target was a singular employee in Kaspersky’s Asia-Pacific offices, breaching the employee’s system with zero-day exploits.
• Although the employee had the most up-to-date patches installed, zero-day exploits are programmed to cause problems by targeting vulnerabilities that aren’t even known as vulnerabilities yet, by the software developer. No patches were available, as a consequence.
• A spear-phishing campaign may have also been used, as data breach response showed deleted browsing history and a complete wipe of the mailbox in the employee’s work system, in order to prevent Kaspersky from analyzing the infection fully.
• This wipe occurred merely 4 hours before the system was identified as “patient zero,” with the attackers knowing that the game was up.
• The attackers are likely to have come to such a conclusion when Kaspersky took many of the company’s crucial security systems offline, after discovering the breach.

And finally Eugene Kaspersky company’s CEO and founder stated that “Kaspersky Lab customers and partners were not affected and are not at risk,”.