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Cyber Criminal activity associated with the financial Trojan programs has increased rapidly during the past few months. However, the Tor -based architecture is the favorite one with online criminals, to hide their bots and the botnet's Command-and-Control real location from the security researchers. Security Researchers at anti-virus firm  Kaspersky Lab have discovered a new Tor-based  banking trojan , dubbed " ChewBacca " (" Trojan . Win32 . Fsysna . fej ")  , that steal banking credentials and hosted on a Tor . onion domain. This protects the location of a server as well as the identity of the owner in most cases. Still there are drawbacks preventing many criminals from hosting their servers within Tor. Due to the overlay and structure, Tor is slower and timeouts are possible. Massive botnet activity may influence the whole network, as seen with Mevade, and therefore let researchers spot them more easily. ChewBacca   malware is not first that adopt Tor for

Ransomware , a t hreat to internet users that continues to grow in popularity with cyber criminals due to its success and monetary potential. This is nothing new and to be expected. I have noticed many discussions on underground hacking forums about " How to create Ransomware like Cryptolocker malware " or " Malware - hacking tool-kit with ransomware features ". Security intelligence provider,  IntelCrawler has discovered  a new ransomware variant called Locker that demands $150 (£92) to restore files that it has encrypted. Like Cryptolocker , this new ransomware is also nasty because infected users are in danger of losing their personal files forever. Locker mainly spreads by drive-by downloads from compromised websites, disguised itself as MP3 files and use system software vulnerabilities to infect the end user. Once it has infected a system, malware first checks the infected machine has an internet connection or not. Then it deletes any original files from t

Super Low RPO with Continuous Data Protection: Dial Back to Just Seconds Before an Attack Zerto , a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, can help you detect and recover from ransomware in near real-time. This solution leverages continuous data protection (CDP) to ensure all workloads have the lowest recovery point objective (RPO) possible. The most valuable thing about CDP is that it does not use snapshots, agents, or any other periodic data protection methodology. Zerto has no impact on production workloads and can achieve RPOs in the region of 5-15 seconds across thousands of virtual machines simultaneously. For example, the environment in the image below has nearly 1,000 VMs being protected with an average RPO of just six seconds! Application-Centric Protection: Group Your VMs to Gain Application-Level Control   You can protect your VMs with the Zerto application-centric approach using Virtual Protection Groups (VPGs). This logical grouping of VMs ensures that your whole applica

Android platform is a primary target for malware attacks from few years and during 2013, more than 79% of mobile operating malware threats are taking place on Android OS. I have been working on Android Malware architectures since last two years and created 100's of sample of most sophisticated malware for demo purpose. Till now we have seen the majority of Android malware apps that earn money for their creators by sending SMS messages to premium rate numbers from infected devices. Security researchers at Lookout identified an interesting monetized Android Malware labeled as ' Mouabad ', that allow a remote attacker to make phone calls to premium-rate numbers without user interaction from C&C servers by sending commands to the malware. The technique is not new, but infection from such app notified first time in the wild. The variant dubbed MouaBad . p. , is particularly sneaky and to avoid detection it waits to make its calls until a period of time after the scree

In October, we had reported that the creator of the infamous Blackhole  exploit kit was  arrested in Russia  and now the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs has also confirmed that ' Paunch ', the mastermind behind infamous  BlackHole  exploit kit, along with Gang of 12 other criminals were arrested on October 4, 2013 in Russia. Russian security firm Group-IB has disclosed that it has assisted the police in the investigation of Paunch, who was residing in the city of Togliatti . 27-years old ' Paunch ' is the author of the notorious BlackHole and Cool exploit kits that are today popular among cybercriminals and costs $500 to $700 a month in for buyers. Cool and Blackhole exploit kits are the ready-made hacking tools for easily serving malware from compromised sites, in result to install malware on users' computers using exploits of zero-day vulnerabilities in latest web browsers. The general damage caused by the criminal gang is estimated around US $2.1

Microsoft today announced that its Digital Crimes Unit ( a center of excellence for advancing the global fight against cybercrime ) has successfully disrupted the ZeroAccess botnet, one of the world's largest and most rampant botnet .The Botnet is " disrupted ," not "fully destroyed" , Microsoft itself admits that " do not expect to fully eliminate the ZeroAccess botnet due to the complexity of the threat. " This is the Microsoft's 8th botnet takedown operation in the past three years. With the help of U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation  ( FBI ) and Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), Microsoft led to the seizure of servers that had been distributing malware which has infected nearly 2 million computers all over the world, and with that, ZeroAccess botnet's masters are earning more than $2.7 million every month. ZeroAccess was first identified in 2011 by Symanetc, being used for click fraud, the malware can also be used to illicitly mine the v

If you think that a computer which is not connected to a network, doesn't have any USB sticks attached to it and doesn't accept any kind of electronic connection requests are reasonably safe against hackers and from all the malware, then you are Wrong. Here we have something shocking update that Some German Scientists have developed a proof of concept Malware prototype, could allow a hacker to infect your computers and other digital devices just using  Inaudible Audio signals . The ability to bridge an air gap could be a potent infection vector. Just imagine, a cyber attack using high-frequency sound waves to infect machines, where stolen data also can be transferred back to attacker without a network connection, Sounds very terrifying ? When a few weeks ago, a security researcher Dragos Ruiu claimed malware dubbed badBIOS  allowed infected machines to communicate using sound waves alone, means that the devices are physically disconnected from any networks, including the inter

Saudi Arabia and Israel's Mossad intelligence division are reportedly collaborating to develop a computer worm more destructive than the Stuxnet malware to spy on and destroy the software structure of Iran's nuclear program. The Iranian Fars news agency has reported : " Saudi spy chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and director of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency Tamir Bardo sent their representatives to a meeting in Vienna on November 24 to increase the two sides' cooperation in intelligence and sabotage operations against Iran's nuclear program. "  " One of the proposals raised in the meeting was the production of a malware worse than the Stuxnet to spy on and destroy the software structure of Iran's nuclear program ," But Why ? The report claims that Saudi Arabia and Israel were not particularly happy with the deal between between Iran and the Group 5+1 (the US, Russia, China, France and Britain plus Germany) and Israel has dubbed the deal as " historic mista

The increasing public attention of Bitcoin did not go unnoticed by Cyber Criminals who have begun unleashing Bitcoin Mining malware. Security researchers at Malwarebytes warned about a new malware threat, in which Bitcoin Miners are bundled with third party potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) that come bundled with legitimate applications. Malware allow cybercriminals to utilize systems' computing resources for their own gain. " This type of system hijacking is just another way for advertising based software to exploit a user into getting even more cash. " The malware is found to be using ' jhProtominer ' a popular mining software that runs via the command line, to abuse the CPUs and GPUs of infected computers to generate Bitcoins. Upon further investigation Malwarebytes found that the parent of the Bitcoin miner was " monitor.exe ", a part of YourFreeProxy application, which " beacons out constantly, waiting for commands from a remote server, eventually downlo

The NSA has the ability to trace " anyone, anywhere, anytime ". In September we reported that how NSA and GCHQ planted malware via LinkedIn and Slashdot traffic to hack largest telecom company Belgacom's Engineers. Yesterday, a  Dutch newspaper has   published a new secret NSA document provided by former intelligence employee  Edward Snowden . According to the newly exposed slide, NSA has infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide with software designed to steal sensitive information i.e. Malware . The slide from the NSA's 2012 management presentation, shows a world map with more than 50,000 targeted locations, uses a procedure called ' Computer Network Exploitation ' (CNE) that can secretly install malware in computer systems. The malware can be controlled remotely and be turned on and off at will. From the NSA website we found that, CNE includes enabling actions and intelligence collection via computer networks that exploit data gathered from target or enem

CryptoLocker is an especially insidious form of Ransomeware malware that was first detected in the wild in September 2013, restricts access to infected computers and requires victims to pay a ransom in order to regain full access. What makes CryptoLocker so bad is the way it encrypts the user data on your hard drive using a strong encryption method. This makes it literally impossible to access your own data without paying the ransom amount to the criminals between $100 and $300 or two  Bitcoins , even now more. Once affected you will be locked out of your computer and unless you pay the ransom amount in 72 hours , the virus will delete the decryption key to decrypt all the files on your PC . The malware lands on PCs the same way other malware does and a few sensible precautions will help minimize the chances of a CrytoLocker attack. Yesterday, we reported that - UK's National Crime Agency has given out an urgent national alert that a mass spamming event target

Japanese most popular word processing software ' Ichitaro ' and Multiple Products are vulnerable to a zero day Remote Code Execution Flaw Vulnerability, allowing the execution of arbitrary code to compromise a user's system. According to assigned CVE-2013-5990 ,  malicious attacker is able to gain system access and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of a local user. The vulnerability is caused due to an unspecified error when handling certain document files. " We confirm the existence of vulnerabilities in some of our products. " company blog says. In a blog post, Antivirus Firm Symantec confirmed that in September 2013, they have discovered attacks in the wild attempting to exploit this vulnerability during, detected as  Trojan.Mdropper , which is a variant of  Backdoor.Vidgrab . Researchers mentioned that  Backdoor.Vidgrab variant was used as a payload for a watering hole attack exploiting the Microsoft Internet Explorer Memory

There's an extraordinary malware making rock-n-roll over the Internet and if you are one of the unlucky folks to cross its path, then it could make your computer unusable and you have to pay a few hundred Dollars to retrieve your important data back. We have warned our readers in many  previous articles about a nasty piece of Ransomware malware called ' CryptoLocker ', which is targeting computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system. The CryptoLocker  Ransomware encrypts the files on a victim's computer and issues an ultimatum - Pay up or lose your data . Users who are getting infected with CryptoLocker can see a message informing them that their computer is locked up and their files encrypted. It then asks them to make a ransom payment, which typically ranges between $100 and $700 or 2 Bitcoins , to get their files back. Just yesterday I noticed on a forum that the criminals behind the CryptoLocker malware has recently launched a dedicated  Cry

When you're online, you expose your vulnerability to malicious virus that have been growing in virulence and ferocity over the last few years.  Among home PC users, you may think that you protected from malicious software by Installing an effective, trusted antivirus solution, but most if the Antivirus solutions still it merely finds and removes any known threats. But what if someday you turn on your system and you will find a pop up window with a warning that says " Your system is Locked and Important drives are encrypted and there is no way out unless you will not Pay fine ". This is what Ransomware malware does to your system. Ransomware is the most serious emerging threat in the virtual world of computing devices. Ransomware is a kind of malware which is designed to Block access to the computing system or can lock your system until an amount of money is paid through Internet banking. Ransomware is usually installed when you open a malicious atta

The TorRAT malware was first appeared in 2012 as spying tool only. But from August 2012, Bitcoin Mining feature was added and it became a powerful hacking tool that was commonly associated with attacks on Financial institutions. ab This year TorRat Malware targeted two out of three major Banks in the Netherlands and the  criminals stole over Million Dollars from user' Banking Accounts. The Dutch  police has arrested four men from Alkmaar, Haarlem, Woubrugge and Roden on last Monday, who are suspected of involvement in the large scale digital fraud and money laundering case using TorRat Malware. Using Spear Phishing techniques, gang  targeted the victims to access their computers and the Financial accounts. The gang used anonymous VPN services, Bitcoins, TorMail and the Tor network itself to remain anonymous. Malware is also capable of manipulating the information during online banking , can secretly add new payment orders and also able to modify existing

Last Tuesday, The National Police Agency of South Korea warned the people that many Malware infected video games being offered in the South Korean markets with the purpose of launching Cyber attacks on the Country. That Malware is collecting location data and IP addresses of infected users and according to experts, malware is sending data back to its master servers based in North Korea . Just today the Korea's largest anti-virus software firm AhnLab  confirmed that they have detected distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on local companies' websites. According to the report, about 16 websites of 13 companies, including Daum, MSN and the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper had been affected. AhnLab said that some 10-thousand computers have been hit, mainly because they failed to install a vaccination program or update an existing one since the last cyber attack in July. The attack was detected around 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, infecting around 10,000 computer

A very profitable line for mobile malware developers is Android Banking Trojans, which infect phones and steal passwords and other data when victims log onto their online bank accounts. One recent trend is Android malware that attacks users in specific countries, such as European Countries, Brazil and India.  The Antivirus software maker Malwarebytes noticed that a new threat distributed via file sharing sites and alternative markets in the last few months, targets Korean users. Dubbed as ' Android/Trojan . Bank . Wroba ', malware disguises itself as the Google Play Store app and run as a service in the background to monitor events.  " This enables it to capture incoming SMS, monitor installed apps and communicate with a remote server. " According to the researcher, after installation - malware lookup for existence of targeted Banking applications on the device, remove them and download a malicious version to replace. " The malicious v