hacks Archives

Tag: hacks

New Banking Trojan Hacks The FAQ To Fool Users

May 1, 2013 Paul Roberts

Cyber criminals are notoriously crafty and persistent, especially when it comes to defeating security measures created to thwart them. But a group behind a recent version of the Ramnit banking malware has raised their game to a new level: hacking the customer FAQ (frequently asked questions) document to make their malicious activity look like it was business-as-usual. A report on Tuesday by the security firm Trusteer finds that new variants of Ramnit targeting a UK bank have added features to game a one-time-password (OTP) feature at the bank. Among other tricks, the Ramnit variant uses an HTML injection attack to alter the wording of the bank’s customer FAQ, making it seem as if prompts created by the malware were standard security features at the bank. The report, published on the Trusteer blog, described a complex ruse in which Ramnit lies dormant on infected machines, then springs to action once a […]

Hacked WordPress Plug-in Put On Double, Secret Probation

April 13, 2013 Paul Roberts

A plug-in that was pulled from the official WordPress plug-in directory has been restored, but will be monitored closely, after the plug-in’s owner claimed a rogue contractor introduced malicious code into the popular web publishing add-on. Social Media Widget, a free plug-in for the WordPress blogging platform with more than a million downloads, was restored to the WordPress.org official plugin directory on Thursday, days after it was found injecting WordPress websites with spam links to web sites offering Pay Day Loans. In a post on a support forum for Social Media Widget, Samuel Wood, a WordPress administrator, said that WordPress.org was willing to give the owner and the plug-in, Brendan Sheehan, a second chance. “Naturally we do take a very hard line on spam, and obviously an author putting malicious code into a plugin is enough grounds for us to bring down the ban hammer,” Wood wrote on Friday. “But […]

That Facebook Account Hijack Vulnerability Is Still Dangerous. Here’s Why.

April 6, 2013 Paul Roberts

Did you hear about that really dangerous security hole that allows attackers to manipulate third party Facebook applications to hack into your Facebook account? Skype and Dropbox both said they fixed a web site redirection vulnerability that both companies fixed before the vulnerability was disclosed? Great news, right? Right. Except for the fact that the same vulnerability may exist in hundreds, or even thousands of other Facebook applications and still provides a ready pathway into Facebook accounts, according to Nir Goldshlager, the Israeli security researcher who discovered the vulnerability. Goldshlager described the vulnerability, which he named the “UnFix Bug” on his web site in a post on Wednesday, after discussing details of the hole with the online publication TechCrunch. It is just the latest in a string of security holes he has discovered in OAuth, an open authentication standard used by social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. The vulnerability allows a […]

Spammers Using Yahoo, Google To Whitewash Links

March 27, 2013 Paul Roberts

If the gigantic distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against the spam blacklisting operation Spamhaus wasn’t proof enough: spammers have trouble steering around blacklists and other reputation-based filters. Even if the language in their message is generic enough to avoid detection, dropping a link to a known, malicious- or compromised domain is plenty to get an entire message dropped. Spammers without a legion of 100,000 bots at their fingertips have to get creative about getting their message into the target’s inbox. Lately, a method that’s drawing attention is to leverage low-security redirection services to whitewash a link to a ‘known-malicious’ or merely suspicious sites. Barracuda Networks said that it has captured spam attacks that are combining a Yahoo based URL shortening service with Google’s free Translate service to whitewash links in spam e-mail messages and evade automated detection. The message, which was sent to a Barracuda “honeypot” system includes a […]

Messy And Loud Hack In South Korea Doesn’t Look State Sponsored

March 22, 2013 Paul Roberts

A researcher who has studied the malicious software used in the attacks on media outlets and banks in South Korea this week said the attacks were coordinated, but messy and loud, without many of the hallmarks of a state sponsored hacking operation. Richard Henderson, a Security Strategist at Fortilabs at Fortinet Inc. said that the malware used in the attack was programmed to begin operating at 2:00pm local time, suggesting that those behind it had planned their operation for weeks or months before launching it. Still, Henderson said many details of the attack make it dissimilar from so-called “advanced persistent threat” or APT-style hacks that are carried out by foreign governments or groups working on their behalf. Henderson said that Fortinet analysts first obtained a copy of the malware on March 19, a day before the attacks. Researchers there had already identified the “time bomb” hidden in the code, which was […]