News, Fraud

An online security firm F-Secure revealed that botnets of compromised machines are now used by cyber criminals to issue units of Bitcoin virtual currency.

Perpetrators used the ideas in distributed computing practiced by the SETI project. Cyber criminals programmed their botnets of zombie machines to farm Bitcoins.

"The bots are created with a generator," writes Mikko H Hypponen, chief research officer at F-Secure. "Generator sets a specific Twitter account to be the one which can be used to control the mining botnet."

South Korean police reported Thursday that over 30 North Korean hackers were recruited to work in China by a South Korean criminal ring. The hackers stole personal data of South Korean gamers and transferred $5 million to North Korea.

Seoul blamed North Korea for distributing malicious software to paralyze web sites of government agencies and businesses as well as orchestrating a cyber attack on a South Korean bank this year that brought down its network.

Data from a Czech security firm showed that a big slice of infected PCs fall upon machines on Windows XP.

Last week Avast Software released its report that reveals that Windows XP machines are disproportionally infected with rootkits.

Having a 58% share of all Windows systems used XP accounts for 74% of the rootkit infected PCs, says Avast.

In comparison, Windows 7 machines make up only 12% of infected PCs.

In the course of a mass iFrame injection attack, nearly 100,000 web pages for e-commerce sites on the open source OS Commerce platform were compromised with malware, reports security firm Armorize.

As estimated the attacks appear to come from Ukraine and they aim to infect the websites with malware to further attack visitors to these e-commerce websites, says Wayne Huang, chief technology officer at Armorize.

An online scam scheme sends junk email messages telling people that a hotel has mistakenly charged their credit card with a wrong payment. The result of being victimized is an infected PC.

According to reports the messages appeared on the net in recent days and so far there are hundreds of versions already. The main theme is: A hotel wrongly charged a credit card number and the victim is supposed to fill out an attached form to process the refund.

Being "under constant attack" supposedly from hackers Nasdaq plans to increase its expenses on cyber security.

"As we sit here, there are people trying to slam into our system every day," Robert Greifeld, chief executive officer of Nasdaq OMX Group, said in an interview on Wednesday. "So we have to be ever-vigilant against an ever-changing foe."

Hackers could damage US power generation plants, water treatment facilities, and other critical infrastructure with clones of the Stuxnet computer worm, warn officials at the US Department of Homeland Security.

When the Stuxnet hurt Iran's nuclear-enrichment operations, it was widely believed that it was Israel and US behind the attack.

Moore Capital Management ex-portfolio manager Christopher Louis Pia agreed on Monday to settle the charges by the US futures regulator and pay $1 million. He was charged with manipulating prices of palladium and platinum futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Pia made attempts to manipulate the settlement prices of palladium and platinum futures contracts from at least November 2007 until May 2008 while working for Moore Capital, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said. He had engaged in a trading practice known as "banging the close.”

14 members of Anonymous hacker group were arrested Tuesday by the US authorities on charges they participated in several major cyber attacks on PayPal as vengeance for declining to process donations for WikiLeaks.

Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested 14 people in 9 states and Washington D.C. for attacking PayPal last December. The attack is widely believed to have been orchestrated by Anonymous.

A top defense official noted this week that a foreign intelligence service stole about 24,000 files from a US defense contractor, which is a dramatic illustration of the threat facing the Pentagon as it makes every effort to tighten computer security.

William Lynn, a Deputy Defense Secretary, said that theft as he unveiled a new Pentagon cybersecurity strategy that designates cyberspace as an "operational domain" like sea, air and land where U.S. forces will practice, train and prepare to defend against attacks.

Cyber security experts found a new version of ZeuS Trojan that targets Android users to steal their money from their banking accounts, reports ThreatPost. The malware intercepts SMS messages which are sent to log into online banking cabinets.

The number of Android malware increased 10 times since the beginning of the year, shows recent stats.

Meantime, the number of criminal schemes using ZeuS has also increased since March when the initial code appeared online.
 

A bug was disclosed in Apple’s software that could be exploited by criminals to gain control over iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices.

On Wednesday the website www.jailbreakme.com released code that Apple customers can use to modify the iOS operating system through jaibreaking. Many Apple customers jailbreak their devices so that they could download and run applications that are not approved by Apple or use iPhone phones on networks of carriers that are not approved by Apple.

As a result of a compromise of a FoxNews.com Twitter account on Monday by hackers people were reported that US President Barack Obama died. Six false tweets were sent from the media source account informing that Obama had been shot dead, prompting an investigation by the Secret Service.

"Hackers sent out several malicious and false tweets that President Obama had been assassinated," Foxnews.com said in a statement about the latest in a wave of high-profile cyber security breaches around the world.

Apple suffered a cyber attack on its servers resulting in the data breach. Hackers attacked the Cupertino company in the frame of their “Antisecurity” program. The attack is attributed to the hackers of Anonymous and retired LulzSec groups.

A new unknown group AntiSec alleges it has discovered a number of flaws on the website of Apple exploiting which leads to get access to the database of user names and passwords of the iPhone, iPad and iTunes users.