The Hacker News - Cybersecurity News and Analysis: Chewbacca

Tor network offers users browse the Internet anonymously and is mostly used by activists, journalists to conceal their online activities from prying eyes. But it also has the Dark side, as Tor is also a Deep Web friendly tool that allows hackers and cyber criminals to carry out illicit activities by making themselves anonymous. Kaspersky security researcher reported that Tor network is currently being used to hide 900 botnet and other illegal hidden services, through its 5,500 plus nodes i.e. Server relays and 1,000 exit nodes i.e. Servers from which traffic emerges. These days, Cyber criminals are hosting malware's Command-and-control server on an anonymous Tor network to evade detection i.e., difficult to identify or eliminate. Illegal use of the Tor network boosted up after the launch of the most popular underground Drug Market - Silk road  that also offered arms and malware to their users against Bitcoin , one of the popular crypto currency . ChewBacca , a point-

After the massive data breaches at U.S retailers Target and Neiman Marcus in which financial credentials of more than 110 million and 1.1 million customers were compromised respectively, shows that the Point of Sale (POS) system has become a new target for the cyber criminals. Despite the BlackPOS malware of Point of Sale (POS) system that comes out as the major cause of these data breaches, malware writers are upgrading and developing more Trojans to target POS system. In December, the security researchers at anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab discovered a Tor-based banking trojan , dubbed " ChewBacca ", that was initially categorized as a Financial trojan, but recently security researchers at RSA have uncovered that 'ChewBacca' is also capable of stealing credit card details from point of sale systems. ' ChewBacca ', a relatively new and private Trojan, used in the 11 countries as a POS malware is behind the electronic theft. ChewBacca communicat

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