Sophisticated botnet steals more than $47M by infecting PCs and phones

http://arstechnica.com/security/2012/12/sophisticated-botnet-steals-more-than-47m-by-infecting-pcs-and-phones/

by Reltair • 14 years ago

31 9 14 years ago

tinco• 14 years ago

People always laugh at me when they notice I use a paper sheet with one time passes instead of sms notification, but this is the precise reason I do it. The coupling between your pc and your phone is too great to really rely on it for being the second phase of your authentication.

I even like to check my bank account on my phone. Completely removing the use of sms as a second phase.

AlexMuir• 14 years ago

Jesus christ. How incompetent are the banks?

Surely you're going to notice sudden repeated transfers to a (presumably foreign) bank account and at least query them? If these guys are able to open hundreds of accounts to spread out the funds then that's another problem, and the banks responsible should be simply blocked.

CRASCH• 14 years ago

They mostly use mules, they get the mules from phishing too. So the money is transferred from one victim to one mule, the mule agrees to send 90% of the money via a non traceable method. The mule is eventually on the hook for 100%.

hcarvalhoalves2• 14 years ago

Tip: you are not thinking like a criminal.

getsaf• 14 years ago

The article describes the "sophisticated" attack

* Phish the users. The user must fall for this attack.

* Prompt the user to MANUALLY download AND install an application on their pc.

* Then (if that's not enough) download and MANUALLY install an app on your phone.

That's a whole lot of poor decisions on the end user's part. I wouldn't be surprised if these user's wouldn't have just replied to an email with their account number and PIN. Better yet just ask them to mail you cash, seems like something they would do too.

Think people. C'mon.

chill1• 14 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. Why was this comment down-voted? Nothing wrong with honesty.

lmkg• 14 years ago

The attacker bootstraps a small exploit (clicking phishing link) into a much larger one (bank access) by using a multi-step escalation of privileges, that in several cases subverts or co-opts standard chains of trust. Sounds pretty slick to me.

Technical sophistication isn't the only form of sophistication. The attack is sophisticated in the trickery it employs to gains the user's trust and give the appearance of being legitimate. A security hole doesn't have to be an OS zero-day to be impressive.

IheartApplesDix• 14 years ago

What is wrong with people today when you sell them a simple smartphone with no training and they don't immediately learn to tell a valid cert from a forged one or a trustworthy application developer from one hired by a bank? The biggest WTF here the fact that we use email for anything and continue to not have a standard encryption protocol. I'm sure they'll get that nailed down though as soon as they find a good way to access all the required decryption keys from a Nasus device.

hcarvalhoalves2• 14 years ago

Yep, always the user's fault.

Never mind that it's still easy as ever to phish by email since the protocol doesn't give any guarantees of anything, not even that the "From" field can be trusted; or that SMS sucks in a similar way; or that their PCs and Android/RIM phones still allow to install untrusted apps by default.

It's quite sophisticated indeed. The prompt to install the PC app happens when the user visits the bank's site. They manage to get the user phone number and send an SMS as if they are the bank. Everything appears legit from the user's point of view. It's shortsighted to blame it on the user.

Sophisticated botnet steals more than $47M by infecting PCs and phones

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