SpyEye Controllers Cash in on Amazon’s Cloud

Investigators from Kaspersky Lab the anti-virus company said that cyber-criminals developing malware since many weeks recently, apparently exploited Simple Storage Service cloud of Amazon that facilitated the dissemination of Trojan SpyEye. SCMagazine reported this on July 29, 2011.

Notably, being a banker Trojan, SpyEye filches money out of the online bank accounts of its victims. It also eludes advanced anti-fraud mechanisms that financial institutions deploy.

The online crooks are very well misusing Amazon's service pertaining to C&C (command-and-control) gateway thereby raising the mean span of life of their malicious software scam.

As per Kaspersky, despite several genuine cloud services having a price tag attached rather than being free, cyber-criminals find them sufficiently attractive.

Jorge Mieres a security expert from Kaspersky Lab stated that actually such cases weren't segregated, indicating that as per the company's research, Internet crooks had been carrying out SpyEye operations through Amazon since the recent period. GMA News published this on August 2, 2011.

Moreover, giving clues on the cyber-criminals' activities, Mieres said that the miscreants possibly utilized stolen data for setting up an account under Amazon Web Service that necessitated the presence of an authentic identity as well as mode-of-payment.

Meanwhile, the discovery by Kaspersky follows just days after Trusteer's investigators revealed that SpyEye's creators morphed their malware into fresh advanced capabilities, which let the Trojan bypass systems that monitored transactions at banks for identifying fraud. Trusteer stated that its investigators sometimes saw 2 fresh variants of SpyEye getting unleashed every week.

Mickey Boodaei CEO of Trusteer stated that SpyEye creators seemed as having determined the way the said defenses worked, therefore were presently continuously attempting at making sure their malware operations went past undetected via those detection mechanisms.

He added that SpyEye appeared as adopting the development practices associated with 'Agile' software such as making codes simple and flexible, as also getting the code developers to quickly roll out fresh configurations.

Meanwhile, according to Mieres, online hooligans routinely exploited cloud services while carrying out their daily operations, and with several other cloud utilities providing content hosting free of cost, such exploitations became yet simpler for cyber-criminals.

Related article: SAP Admits the Charges of Downloading Oracle’s Data

» SPAMfighter News - 8/12/2011