New Trojan Gives Criminals Full-service Bank Theft

Security experts agree that cyber-criminals are getting better, but a new Trojan takes things to a whole new level.

The URLzone Trojan, identified by researchers at Web filtering vendor Finjan Software earlier this month, represents "the next generation of bank Trojans," said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, Finjan's chief technology officer.

After it infected about 6,400 computer users last month, the Trojan was clearing about €12,000 (US$1,750) per day. That puts it on track to rake in as much as €7.3 million annually.

Criminals installed the Trojan by luring visitors to infected Web sites and leveraging a variety of PC software flaws. They managed to infect about 7.5 percent of the 90,000 computers they attacked before Finjan got access to their command-and-control server, the company said.

More widespread Trojans such as Zeus and Clampi have been siphoning millions of dollars per day out of banks by stealing victim's online credentials and then moving money to unsuspecting "money mules" who then transfer the cash offshore. These mules are often recruited from job sites such as Monster.com and they typically believe they're doing legitimate payroll work for overseas companies, and not organized criminal enterprises. Once they send the stolen money offshore, they can be the ones who are held accountable for the loss.

But URLzone is even more sophisticated than its predecessors, Ben-Itzhak said.

Its sophisticated user interface lets the bad guys set some controls that help keep fraud detection systems at bay. From a central server, they can, for example, set the system to ensure that the account's balance never drops below zero; they can pre-set the system to make a series of small withdrawals that will appear unsuspicious; and the software will change the way the victim's banking page is displayed so the true transactions don't get displayed.

"Basically they say, 'I will steal from you €5,000, but I want to make sure at least 5 percent will remain in your balance,'" Ben-Itzhak said.

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Drudge, Other Sites Flooded With Malicious Ads

Criminals flooded several online ad networks with malicious advertisements over the weekend, causing popular Web sites such as the Drudge Report, Horoscope.com and Lyrics.com to inadvertently attack their readers, a security company said Wednesday.


The trouble started on Saturday, when the criminals somehow placed the malicious ads on networks managed by Google's DoubleClick, as well as two others: YieldManager and ValueClick's Fastclick network, according to Mary Landesman, a senior security researcher with ScanSafe.

The attack comes just a week after the New York Times Web site was tricked into displaying a deceptive 'scareware' advertisement for fake antivirus software from scammers pretending to be ad buyers with Vonage, an Internet telephony company.

Instead of trying to trick Web surfers into buying bogus software, these ads attacked.

They would pop up a nearly invisible window in the victim's browser that contained a maliciously encoded pdf document, which included attack code that placed a variant of the Win32/Alureon Trojan horse program on the victim's computer. Sometimes, the ads would also try to exploit a previously patched flaw in Microsoft's DirectShow software, Landesman said.

"The user would have seen a very brief opening of a blank pdf window and it would be at the bottom portion of their screen," she said. The Alureon Trojan is known to download additional malware and often hijack victims' search results, she said.

The pdf attacks apparently only affected victims with out-of-date versions of Adobe's Reader or Acrobat software, she added.

Between Saturday and Monday, the ads accounted for 11 percent of all Web pages blocked by ScanSafe's Web filtering software, a sign that many people were being presented with the malicious ads. And because the pdf pages were modified slightly every time they were displayed, most antivirus products didn't detect them.

In tests, ScanSafe found that only 3 out of 41 antivirus vendors detected the malware.

"To be honest, they were pretty clever in the way they carried this out," Landesman said. "They managed to infiltrate sites that enjoy very good traffic and they were able to use a mechanism for creating this pdf that caused it to be nearly completely undetected."

This is not the first time Google's DoubleClick has been associated with this type of malicious advertising. Earlier this year criminals placed similar ads on the home page of technology trade magazine eWeek, whose ads were managed by DoubleClick.

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