Alert over Increasing Hacking Attacks on SMEs from Europe

Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (US), representing some of the country's largest banks, warned all its members in the last week of August 2009 about an increase in cyber criminal activities targeting small to mid-sized business.

The warning appeared after a stupendous rise in sophistication level, surreptitiousness and absolute volume of harmful software that are targeting the banking sector and causing great mayhem. As per the new estimates by antivirus making firm 'Trend Micro,' around 253 Million systems were infected with malware in 2008, the bulk of which were the outcome of software lying in wait on harmful or hacked websites.

The rate at which new samples of malware are being made, Trend Micro has estimated that the number of systems hit by malware in 2009 will nearly twice of last year to 491 Million.

Further, the alert cautions that in some cases attackers are using password-stealing malware designed to steal so-called "two-factor authentication" credentials like time passwords from scratch-off pads or battery-operated key fobs (which produce a new password approximately every minute).

The alert states if the bank customer is using two factor authentication, then the Trojan keystroke logger may find this and will send an instant message to the attacker.

Majority of the attacks are originating from the Eastern Europe websites and uses money mule to process the funds and to send them to fraudsters.

As per the security experts, in the last few months, media and law enforcement agencies, financial institutions, security agencies have been registering a prominent rise in funds transfer fraud, including exploitation of authentic banking credentials of small and mid-sized businesses.

Therefore, the industry group suggests that commercial banking customers adopt some reasonably meticulous actions to protect their online banking accounts.

The commercial banking customers should conduct all online banking activity from a standalone, hard-bitten, locked-down system from which web browsing and mail is not possible. Such a system may be a virgin install of Windows with all the efficient updates, using something like Microsoft steady state.

Related article: Alert Issued on Unauthentic Software Sites

» SPAMfighter News - 9/7/2009