Symantec’s latest security report: web attacks getting much worse

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 09 April 2008 22:45

Your IT - Home IT

Australia’s largest city, Sydney, has the largest national percentage of bot activity with 27 percent for Australia, followed by Australia’s second largest city, Melbourne, with 19 percent.

Symantec says that “Vundo” and “Infostealer.Gampass” were the #1 and #2 malicious code samples in Australia, respectively, with most of the malicious code samples in the Australian market purely focused on stealing information which can then be bought, sold or traded through a “mature, consolidated underground economy” – in bulk rates for as little as US $1 to $15 per identity, with credit card information selling at US 40c a pop!

Vundo is a Trojan which downloads and then installs an adware component onto afflicted computers, with Symantec saying that “it is not surprising that attackers favour this threat since the adware component allows the attacker to generate revenue from every compromised computer.”

Symantec says the answer to why hackers are so active is simple: they’re “usually motivated by financial gain”, with “this revenue generation [likely] further indicative of the increasing commercialisation and professionalisation of malicious code.”

Further, “since commercial and professional malicious code may involve the employment of individuals to create and maintain the code, income is required to compensate the work.”

Symantec notes that trojans are also frequently used to steal information that an attacker can sell or profit from in other ways. Here we learn that the Infostealer.Gampass Trojan can be “used to steal a user’s online gaming account information, which can then be sold to other gamers.”

Online gaming is a fantastic target for malware writers because it has become “one of the most popular Internet activities and often features goods that can be purchased for real money, which provides a potential opportunity for attackers to benefit financially, particularly since the online gaming market is largely unregulated.”

But Vundo and Infostealer.Gamepass aren’t the only two nasties – they’re just the top two. Please read onto page 3 to find out some of the others you need to be on the lookout for to protect yourself from.