Romanian Hackers Breached 500k Australian Credit Cards

In a news information from ExtratTorrent site Australian authorities have verified that the Romanian hackers have somehow managed to steal over $25,000,000 from 500,000 Australian credit cards.  According to the report  there are only four people involved in the crime and they are still at large.

The country’s Federal Police is currently working with international law enforcement agencies an attempt to arrest the organized hackers. The intrusion seems to have come after the attackers took out a number of merchants whose individual computer systems appeared to be compromised.

Media data say that there’s indications that the same hacker group has been responsible for a hack of the American chain of Subway restaurants.

Four citizens of Romania have now been charged over millions of dollars in credit card fraud that affected around 80,000 bank customers. The so-called “syndicate” used to find its targets by simply scanning the site for vulnerable point of sale terminals. The Australian Police claimed that the borderless nature of this criminal act would definitely initiate much of the new head aches for the law enforcement authorities. The matter is that not only do the police need to co-operate with other police forces, but also require international and private sector co-operation in order to track and to take down the criminals.

However, this is obviously not easy to work. The police officers can’t take down the cyber criminals because they are searching even softer victims with local chippies with unsafe point of sale machines than the attackers do with either banks or supermarket chains. So, the bank customers are still under threat, and the police can’t promise the safety for their money.

Tips for a Secure Internet Banking

Internet banking users should carefully monitor Trojan Spyware attacks because they can lead to financial fraud on their online accounts.

Kasikornbank recommends its K-Cyber Banking users take the following precautionary measures before conducting any financial transactions:

- You must always check the third-party account number and/or name shown in your opt-in SMS message to make sure the third-party information is correct before entering the OTP (one-time password) to confirm the transaction.

If your computer is infected with a Trojan, the instruction sent to the K-Cyber Banking system as well as information shown on the computer screen will be altered by the virus.

- You must always check the third-party account number and/or name shown in the e-mail confirmation sent to you from K-Cyber Banking after each transaction is completed.

If you find any irregularity in the OTP SMS or e-mail, you should immediately call the K-Contact Centre (02-888-8888) to suspend your K-Cyber Banking service until you are certain the Trojan has been eliminated from your computer.

- You should set your preferences to let the system notify you by e-mail every time you log in to K-Cyber Banking.

- In order to minimise risks from Trojans on your computer, you should follow security tips shown on the log in page. For example, regularly update your computer programmes (for example, operating systems, browers, and antivirus programmes), do not click on any URL links in any e-mails to access the bank's online banking system, and do not visit any dubious websites or run any suspicious programmes.

KBank said if customers follow its security measures, they will not be asked to participate in any security tests.

Therefore, users must not follow any requests to enter their user ID and password, especially by OTP SMS sent to their mobile phones to perform security testing.

read the rest of the story at BangkokPost

WARNING: New Android Malware

A new piece of malware is trying to take advantage of Opera's popularity as a mobile browser alternative on Android smartphones. Cybercriminals have created a new variant of Opfake that bundles the real Opera Mini version 6.5 so as to further mask what the malware is actually doing (earning its creators money from unsuspecting users by sending international text messages). GFI, which first discovered the malware, is calling this particular threat Trojan.AndroidOS.Generic.A. The package is named "com.surprise.me" while the file name is "opera_mini_65.apk" (both can easily be changed).

As you can see above, two sets of "Permission to Install" pages are displayed during installation. The first (above in the middle), comes from the malware itself: it asks for read and modify rights to all SMS and MMS messages, read rights to all contacts stored on the smartphone, modify or delete rights to the SD card, and so on. The second (above on the right) one appears once users agree to install the first, which is simply the permissions required for the legitimate Opera Mini browser.

This particular threat is interesting because it shows that OpFake is evolving. Instead of trying to mimic a popular app, OpFake now simply installs the real version. As a result, the user is less suspicious that something is wrong. "More than likely, users will not be aware that something might have infiltrated their phones until the bill arrives," a GFI spokesperson said in a statement.


Read the rest of the story at ZDNET

FBI Issues Warrants For WikiLeaks Attacks

The FBI is on the hunt for the hackers responsible for a recent wave of cyberattacks launched in defense of WikiLeaks.

FBI agents yesterday executed more than 40 search warrants in the United States as part of their ongoing investigation. Pointing to the group Anonymous, which has taken responsibility for the attacks, the FBI said
that the distributed denial of service (DDoS) assaults were facilitated by software the group makes available as free downloads.

Late last year, PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, and other companies were hit by DDoS attacks triggered by activists in support of WikiLeaks after the companies cut off sources of funding to the whistle-blowing site.

The FBI apparently started its investigation after it was contacted by PayPal in December and was able to trace two of the IP addresses provided by PayPal to physical locations, one of which was in Texas where the agency seized a server.

Looking beyond the United States, the FBI said it's working with other law enforcement agencies abroad. Officials in the Netherlands, Germany, and France are each conducting their own probes into the cyberattacks, while police in the U.K. arrested five people yesterday on suspicion of involvement in the attacks launched by Anonymous.

Additionally, an organization called the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance is lending a hand in the investigations. With a focus on cybercrime, the group provides a bridge between the private sector and law
enforcement agencies and has worked directly with the FBI in the past.

Those who facilitate or conduct a DDoS attack face up to 10 years in prison and civil fines over damages, according to the FBI.

Read more: CNET

Fifth of Facebook Users Exposed To Malware

Security software manufacturer BitDefender today released some statistics gleaned from Safego, a Facebook application that it offers to users of the social-network to keep an eye on their vulnerability to malware. The big finding: 20 percent of Facebook users are exposed to malicious posts in their "news feeds" of friends' activity, generally defined as posts that, when clicked on, result in "the user's account being hijacked and in malware being automatically posted on the walls of the respective user's friends."

The numbers were derived from Safego's analysis of news feed items viewed by the 14,000 Facebook users who have installed the app. Considering Facebook has 500 million users around the world, that's a small sample, but it's also a sample of users who, by virtue of installing the app in the first place, indicate that they're relatively security-minded. The "average" Facebook user may well be even more likely to see malicious posts, in theory.

Over 60 percent of attacks come from notifications from malicious third-party applications on Facebook's developer platform, the study found. Within that, the most popular subset of "attack apps" (21.5 percent of total kinds of malware) were those that claim to perform a function that Facebook normally prohibits, like seeing who has viewed your profile and who has "unfriended" you. 15.4 percent lure in users with bonus items for Facebook games like free items in FarmVille; 11.2 percent offer bonus (yet bogus) Facebook features like free backgrounds and "dislike buttons," 7.1 percent promise new versions of well-known gaming titles like World of Warcraft; 5.4 percent claim to give away free cell phones; and 1.3 percent claim to offer a way to watch movies for free online.

Beyond "app attacks," BitDefender found that an additional 16 percent of malware viewed on Facebook entices users to watch some kind of shocking video, like this one that claims to depict an anaconda coughing up a hippo, and that an additional 5 percent of attacks can be connected to viruses like Koobface.
And this isn't all the malware that gets flung across the social network: The BitDefender app only analyzed what's visible in users' news feeds. Private Facebook messages, which were just upgraded and expanded to include many different points of entry last week, are also vulnerable to attack.

Facebook says that it monitors activity routinely and keeps abreast of security concerns as quickly and expediently as possible, but as with anything else on the Web, dealing with malware is always a game of defense.

Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20023626-36.html#ixzz16NAmAabs