Cyber-Criminals Abusing Iran’s Political Crisis, Distributing Malware

While the media reports of how the opposition political party in Iran is adopting social-networking websites, particularly 'Twitter' to circumvent government regulation of news relating to the recent presidential election and the successive protests, an Internet security expert is cautioning surfers of cyber-criminals who are taking advantage of the crisis and distributing malware.

John Bambenek, security researcher at SANS Internet Storm Center has this alert for those who might be clicking web-links presented inside random 'tweets' regarding current events in Iran. SecurityManagement reported this on June 16, 2009.

As mentioned, related malware attacks are occurring to redirect users onto malicious websites. Twitter and other social-networking websites are opening doors for cyber-criminals to distribute malicious software since they are allowing anyone to create a blogging site and equip it with posts regarding the political crisis, along with a couple of borrowed images depicting the clashes.

Further some Tweets are traveling across the Web depicting captions, which talk of presenting live situations of protestors facing gun shots. But these tweets connect to different blogs, which contain pre-tested malicious programs that, understandably, many anti-virus software are unable to detect.

Security researchers elucidate that social-networking software and Twitter provide one more mechanism that draws users towards the cyber-attack that previously involved only e-mails i.e. the absence of anti-spam utilities that let anyone's writing on a topic to get displayed.

Thus, while answering an interview for al-Jazeera, a reformist opponent of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad stated that for them the Net acted just as an air force that functioned during a military maneuver i.e. blasting the camps of the enemy and creating the opportunity for attacking the infantries, in their case their activists, for victory.

Further the Twitter problem is also in its lack of getting to know a particular message's authenticity, as Twitter would display anybody's opinion on a subject. Besides, Twitter has no tool to evaluate the standing of an individual who posts information. Nevertheless, the number of tweets and followers helps, but since the majority of users making posts, though has hundreds of followers, yet they are too trivial a number even before the first tweet.

» SPAMfighter News - 27-06-2009

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