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eBay Accounts Stolen by Botnet

Identity thieves are targeting the accounts of eBay, an online auction Website. Thieves are exerting a botnet, which forcefully unveils the log-in information of account, reported a security company based in Tel Aviv on September 3, 2007.

The theft has been taking place since past one week to pilfer the personal financial data, as reported by the officials at Aladdin Knowledge Systems. Also, the new botnet was found out on 3rd September 2007 by the security firm, reported eWEEK.com on September 4, 2007.

According to Aladdin, a so-called "sophisticated" Trojan is being planted by botnet on the systems of the users visiting hacked Websites. About 300 famous Websites are attacked according to the security firm. It compels the users to visit the affected sites. Aladdin, based in Israel, mainly focused on popular sites in Israel. A main site of the largest Israeli labor union and a famous e-commerce site for price comparison are amongst the affected site.

The product manager of Aladdin's eSafe threat-protection line, Ofer Elzam, stated that the brute-force attacks are done through large botnet that are built by identity thieves with the help of a sophisticated, multistage campaign beginning with compromised legitimate Websites, reported PC World on September 4, 2007.

The resultant botnet is being employed for calling an eBay API (Application Programming Interface) with possible passwords and usernames pairing. The Trojan-nfected PC - the bot - is allowed by API, which helps in communicating with the database of eBay with the help of XML-formatted code. The Trojan notes would transmit it to a server controlled by the hacker if the database consists of the password-username pair.

Elzam also added that as less as six username-password pairs might be used by each bot to avoid the eBay security radar. Also, that eBay might not even know about the attack as the attack appears to be confirmations from merchants to buyers.

The malware attacks though are nothing new, but they seem to have hiked up tremendously in this year. For instance, around 10,000 Websites were launched with massive bot-building attack, where majority of them had been put up in Italy in June 2007.

Related article: eBay Announces Its New “Safeguarding Member IDs” Project

» SPAMfighter News - 9/14/2007

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