Hackers Targeting Kids through Internet Games for Serving Malicious Software

According to BitDefender, Web-based games luring children with opportunities for rearing online kittens, drawing and coloring witches and pumpkins, alternatively playing "spot-the-differences" pictures carry malicious software, thus enabling fraudsters to pull computer systems within global botnets or even gain admission into the parents' financial information, reported SmartHouse dated September 22, 2011.

According to Chief Reporter Warwick Ashford with Computer Weekly, kids were the most natural attack point of the above ruse wherein uncomplicated games such as "spot-the-differences" among a pair of likewise pictures were getting poisoned with malicious programs seizing financial information or causing botnet infection. ComputerWeekly.com published this on September 21, 2011.

Unfortunately, BitDefender warns that the problem will just be expanding, as an online research lately showed that 47%-or-so of British and American children owned user-accounts on social-networking websites, while 25% of parents didn't keep watch over their kids' Internet behavior.

Incidentally, in only the second-week of September 2011, investigators from BitDefender detected 6 instances of the said kind of Flash-oriented, extremely colorful as also 'very-appealing-to-children' sort of games that were packed with Trojans created for directing the kids to websites that pulled down and loaded malicious software designed to seize financial data.

Here Catalin Cosoi, BitDefender's Chief of Online Threats Laboratory says that a few scams may arouse doubt among adults, especially whilst the former attempt at loading program on the target PC alternatively divert its user onto dubious Internet sites, published SiliconRepublic dated September 21, 2011.

She states that the fraudsters therefore tend to chase easier targets like children who can be effortlessly tempted into hitting the flashing icon alternatively download button for supposedly more fun, adding that youngsters around 4-yrs of age, obviously is not concerned of Internet-banking flaws.

Nonetheless, BitDefender advises parents to allow their children for accessing just a few user-accounts so that they don't install software, which could change crucial system configurations, alternatively erase system files, which may harm the computer's OS.

Besides, cyber-criminals also find children easy targets via websites that relate to entertainment or education, or even websites for adopting virtual pets. So they plant malware on such authentic, largely-visited websites, researchers discovered.

» SPAMfighter News - 01-10-2011

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