Hackers use data theft and targeted
attacks for financial gain
By Daniel Tan, channelnewsasia.com | Posted: 23 March 2007 1418
hrs
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SINGAPORE: Data theft, data leakage, and the creation of malicious
code that targets specific organizations is on the rise, and while
the United States remains the top country of attack origin, Asia is
where all the action happens.
In Symantec's latest Internet Security Threat Report, China held the dubious honour of having the
largest number of bot-infected computers and also the highest
levels of malicious activity.
The report also ranked Singapore a regional second in malicious
activity by country per Internet user, although, according to
Symantec executives, this ranking was due to the small population
of Internet users, which meant that each incident carried more
proportional weight.
Additionally, since English is commonly spoken in Singapore, this
increases Singapores exposure to mass-mailing worms and other
English-based malicious code.
As a financial hub, Singapore becomes more susceptible to phishing
attacks.
Phishing, a method used to trick consumers into giving up user
information by fake e-mails from banks and other organizations, has
been linked with Japan where the highest percentage of phishing
websites in the Asia Pacific region reside.
Symantec said this could be because Japan is home to the second
largest number of Web-hosting companies in Asia, and hosting a
phishing site with a small Web-hosting company can be advantageous
for a phisher, as these small hosts do not monitor their sites as
closely.
This is especially with the rise of pump and dump scams which
have allowed spammers to generate revenue almost immediately and
with the rise from 15% to 30% of spam related to financial products
or services.
Little surprise then that Symantec also said it has tracked for the
first time, the trade of stolen confidential information and
captured data being sold on underground servers.
According to the report, the underground economy where stolen
identities and financial-account information are bought and sold
have become more sophisticated, with anything from a persons
US-based credit card with card verification being sold at $1-$6, to
a verified PayPal account with balance ($50-$500 price tag), and
even World of Warcraft accounts ($10 price tag).
Much of the data is stolen by infecting computers to allow hackers
to gain access to passwords and other sensitive information through
e-mails. More often than not, this happens with spam that has
viruses or other malicious code.
In the Philippines, spam made up 88% of all email traffic, while
37% of all spam detected from the Asia-Pacific region originated in
China. This is likely due to the high number of broadband users and
the high percentage of bot-infected computers there.
The home user sector remains, by far, the most highly targeted
sector in the Asia Pacific, making up 98% of all targeted attacks.
Threats targeting online games and gamers are also emerging as a
new focus of malicious activity, as gamers are known to turn off
security features to improve gaming performance.
Symantec said hackers are more aggressively using flaws in
Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser and Office applications
to plant Trojan's in PCs because these applications allow them to
bypass firewall and antivirus defences.
IE was the most targeted browser with 77% of all targeted attacks,
and also had the highest number of documented vulnerabilities at
54. This was followed by Mozilla with 40, followed by Opera and
Safari with four documented vulnerabilities.
In terms of exposure window - or the time it takes for the company
to fix the vulnerability Mozilla had the shortest window of
exposure, just 2 days, followed by IE with 10 days. Apple had the
longest window of exposure at 61 days.
Regardless of the operating system, users need to make sure the
system gets regular update patches for the new vulnerabilities that
are coming around, said Gavin Lowth, Director, Online Channels,
Asia-Pacific and Japan, Symantec.
Users should also have an internet security suite with
technologies like anti-virus, firewalls, anti-phishing, etc that
get continually updated.
Being one of the world's largest security-software makers, Symantec
has a comprehensive view into malicious code trends. Its
semi-annual study draws on the work of its experts and on data from
more than 40,000 network sensors in 180 countries, more than 120
million PCs that use its security software, some two million decoy
email accounts and a popular forum it operates where security
experts disclose security vulnerabilities.
