Hackers Attack Global Banks with Just Found ‘Silence’ Banking Trojan

One fresh banker Trojan has been detected and found employing techniques resembling ones that the Carbanak employed. The Trojan has been targeting financial institutions mostly in Russia.

According to security researchers from Kaspersky Lab, the new Trojan called "Silence" is used for acquiring continuous access of certain online banking network even as it makes video recordings of computer operations by bank employees, identifies the software they use and the operational activities of the bank. Once equipped with all this knowledge, the attackers controlling the malware apply that knowledge for grabbing cash out of the banks' customer accounts. Scmagazine.com posted this, November 1, 2017.

By monitoring victims' activities in the bank, the attackers get all the necessary details from them for sniffing the bank's networks while escape unnoticed with stolen money. The victims get an e-mail containing one malicious attachment masquerading as 'Windows help.' The attachment contains a CHM file with a JavaScript embedded that by default downloads one Visual Basic programmed script and runs it that thereafter pulls down the Trojan installer via its command-and-control (C&C) server.

The researchers state that the controllers of 'Silence' possibly are a Russian-speaking group that has targeted no less than ten financial institutions with some inside Malaysia and Armenia although the majority is inside Russia. This is unlike Russian cyber-criminals who usually spare attacking domestic targets.

Like Carbanak, first victims of Silence are duped with spoofed electronic mails that enable the hackers to gain entry inside the network. The hackers then hang around for as long as it needs them to get all the information for striking attack and stealing huge amounts of funds.

The spoofed e-mails are highly personalized to craft them as spear-phishing e-mails. Kaspersky researchers point out that the hackers had previously attacked to infect banking infrastructure so they could dispatch the malicious messages via the ids belonging to genuine bank employees thus making the e-mails appear inconspicuous while trapping the victims.

The Carbanak gang too was the discovery of Kaspersky Lab back during 2015. According to a particular report then, the infamous hackers managed filching a maximum of $1 billion from over a hundred banks globally.

» SPAMfighter News - 11/7/2017