cybercrime

On Wednesday Australian government announced the legislation to prosecute cybercrime in view of a recent storm of attacks on multinational companies and institutions including governmental websites across the globe.

Attorney-General Robert McClelland said that cybercrime was a growing threat to individuals, businesses and governments with the country's giant resource industry having warned recently of near-daily hacking attempts from offshore.

According to the finding of Seculert there is a new combination of two pieces of advanced online banking malware circulating on the Internet now. The virus appears to be a beta version of a piece of malware that has bits of both Zeus and SpyEye, says Aviv Raff, CTO and cofounder of Seculert.

Food industry is being attacked by a new family of malware agents, reports a DDoS security solutions provider. Some versions of the Darkshell botnet agent, circulating in China, turn Windows based PCs into attack drones. Infected machines phone to command and control nodes for instructions, periodically receiving instructions on sites to invade with junk traffic.

According to the data from net security firm Damballa western countries such as US, Germany and France occupy top positions in the botnent hosting charts. While China and Russia are known for their gangs that deal with hacking, spamming and cybercrime, these rank far below the western world as compiled by Damballa.

The report shows that for the first half of 2010, almost a quarter (23.9%) of botnet CnC servers were hosted by service providers in the US, followed by Germany with 17.9% and France with 8.6%.

According to the latest research from Symantec entitled "Norton Cybercrime Report: The Human Impact", about 65% of all web users globally have become the victims of cybercrime.

According to the research data, 58% of cybercrime victims, hurt by viruses and online credit card fraud, feel angry, while 51% responded they were annoyed and 40% admitted to feeling cheated.

Moreover, 80% of web users don't believe the cybercriminals will be caught, while only 3% believe they won't fall victim to crime online.

Under a bill introduced Tuesday in the Senate foreign countries that benign neglected to cybercrime will lose US financial assistance and resources.

The International Cybercrime Reporting and Cooperation Act is to require the President to identify "countries of cyber concern" and to plot a course to help each one get tougher on cybercrime.

Those countries that don't reach prescribed benchmarks would face economic penalties in the form of cuts to trade assistance grants, US export dollars and foreign-direct investment funds.

The Trojan horse program decided to battle against its much-larger rival, by stealing data and then removing the malicious program from infected computers.

 According to the security researchers, the relatively unknown Spy Eye toolkit added this feature called "Kill Zeus” just a few days ago in a bid to displace its larger rival.

Apart from direct attacks from the specialized hard core cyber criminals the Internet is getting flooded with the infections coming from ordinary people who practice using do-it-yourself cybercrime kits. The fact is especially troubling in light of that the prices for such tools have dropped and moreover they have become more user-friendly.

"If you know how to download music or a movie you have the necessary experience to begin using one of these kits," says Gunter Ollman, senior researcher at security firm Damballa.

In the course of joint efforts between Neustar and Internet service providers the command-and-control servers of the Lethic botnet have been taken out, though it does not seem to be too effective.

Dark Reading reports that perpetrators behind the Lethic specialised in distributing unlicensed pharmaceutical, diploma and replica goods spam. Compromised machines in the network are reckoned to have spewed out as much as one in 10 of junk mails circulating globally.

On Wednesday a Chinese court sentenced 11 cybercriminals who participated in writing and distributing Trojan horse viruses meant to steal online game account passwords, as reported by the local media sources.

Xinhua media agency says that the crooks who stole login information for more than 5 million game accounts, were given prison sentences of up to three years and were fined a total of 830,000 Chinese yuan (US$120,000). Dozens of other members of the ring, which is suspected of 30 million yuan ($4.4 million) in crime, are expected to be sentenced soon.

According to a new cybercrime Symantec report, tens of millions of US PCs are infected with scam security software. Moreover, software, users may have pay for, can only make computers more vulnerable.

 Symantec found 250 varieties of security malware with legitimate sounding names like Antivirus 2010 and SpywareGuard 2008. The company also found about 43 million attempted downloads in one year, however it was not made sure how many of the attempted downloads succeeded. 

Nowadays cybersecurity is vital to everything we do. How often do you use a computer? How much of your sensitive information is stored either on your own computer or on someone else's system? It seems that everything depends on computers and the Internet, starting from shopping and communication to education and banking.