Category Archives: Website owners

Anyone who owns or operates a Web site that is accessible to the world is a potential target for malware distributors.

10 Threats from 2010 We’d Prefer Remain History

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By Andrew Brandt

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With 2010 finally behind us, and an unknown number of cyberattacks likely to come in the new year, I thought I’d run down a brief list of the malicious campaigns criminals pulled off last year that I’d really dread to see anyone repeat. Now that they’re in the past, they should stay there.

Operation Aurora: Google’s accusation (with Adobe, Juniper Networks, Rackspace, Yahoo! and Symantec) that China hacked its servers, allegedly stealing private emails stored on the company’s servers. The big surprise wasn’t that it was happening, but that companies were publicly talking about it.

Abused ccTLDs: 2010 saw lots more malicious content originating from previously un-abused country code top-level domains, which are assigned to national authorities, such as the .in (India) and .cc (Cocos (Keeling) Islands) top-level domains. The Cocos Islands’ .cc domain deserves particular note because the more than 2200 malicious domains (discovered during 2010) hosted under this ccTLD outnumber the approximately 600 human inhabitants of the tiny archipelago by nearly 4-to-1.

Koobface: “the little social network worm that could” employed new URL obfuscation techniques, introduced its own keylogger, and focused efforts on a smaller number of social media sites, while Facebook got more proactive at shutting down the worm’s operations quickly. Maybe this year they’ll disappear altogether.

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Internet Misuse: Bandwidth Does Matter

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By Ian Moyse, EMEA Channel Director

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Recent studies demonstrate that upwards of 25% of Internet bandwidth in an office are consumed by employees misusing the internet. According to Gartner, the average growth of business email volume is 30% annually, with the average size of the email content growing in parallel. Add to this the growth of Web misuse from streaming media, downloads, file sharing, social networking, and spam, and it becomes pretty clear that the mismanaged cost to business of non-work-related Internet use is already bad and getting worse.

There are plenty of examples, including employees wasting more than two hours a day on recreational computer activities (according to a survey fielded by AOL & Salary.com) and that, according to an IDC report, “30% – 40% of Internet use in the workplace is unrelated to business.”

Studies and surveys such as these typically focus only on lost productivity — and there’s no doubt that’s bad enough. But they rarely discuss the significant hidden financial impact of bandwidth wastage from these activities.

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Troublesome Trojan Trammels Torrent Sites

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By Andrew Brandt

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We spotted an interesting behavior from a Trojan dropper that belongs to a family of malware named Ponmocup. The file, update.exe (MD5 89f4ea9f0240239e0d97f202d22af325) leaves behind a payload that, among other things, modifies the Hosts file on infected computers to prevent users from visiting popular Bittorrent sites, including The Pirate Bay.

It’s an odd behavior for several reasons. We don’t see many Trojans modify the Hosts file anymore because such modifications are so easily reversed. But more to the point: Why would a criminal care whether anyone else be able to browse The Pirate Bay, a Web site known to host torrents of pirated, copyrighted material? And why also block Mininova, which changed its content model more than a year ago and no longer hosts copyrighted files? None of these things make sense.

It seems at first blush like the act of someone who fancies himself a copyright vigilante, sophisticated enough to build a custom tool such as this, but who isn’t smart enough to know which sites to block.

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Malware Threats: What Would Churchill Do?

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By Ian Moyse, EMEA Channel Director

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With Christmas fast approaching, (lest we forget the shops have kindly put all the Christmas goods out in September and early October again!) we can expect online attacks to increase as per their normal schedules, ramping up through the end of the year.

With apologies to Sir Winston Churchill, never in the field of Internet conflict was so much harm done to so many by so few.

For all the benefits the Internet provides our lives, no single technology has given so few criminals the ability to cheaply and easily target the many. We’ve seen the rise of the dark economy, where far flung cybercriminals trade skills and produce burglary tools for sale, and we live with the consequences every day. Sophisticated attacks target both our computers and our users, through social engineering.

While the increases in cybercrime incidents seem to indicate a greater number of attackers, the reality is that the growth of the Internet itself gives rise to the ever-increasing volume of botnets, keyloggers and spam. The Internet makes us all contactable and, to a degree, easily identifiable. As we surf the Web, we leave traces of our presence in the form of electronic footprints — cookies, blog postings, and of course, our activities on social networks and other online forums.

And yet, no matter what we do to stem the tide, the problems only seem to increase in size and scope.

You can tune in and listen live to more of Ian Moyse’s predictions for next year’s most serious threats in his free Webinar, ThreatNet 2011, Thursday, November 4, at 10am Eastern.

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Five Reasons You Should Always “Stop. Think. Connect.”

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By Andrew Brandt

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Today’s the official kickoff for National Cyber Security Awareness Month, and the organizations supporting the event, including the National Cyber Security Alliance, the Anti-Phishing Working Group, and dozens of corporate citizens including Webroot, want you to protect your computer and your personal information. So they’ve come up with a three word campaign slogan they hope will become conventional wisdom for every Internet user: Stop. Think. Connect. Think of it as the 21st century equivalent of looking both ways before crossing the street.

In my case, they’re preaching to the choir. For years, I’ve advocated that people treat everything they see online critically, and to scrutinize information before acting on it. That’s because the army of criminals who commit fraud and theft over the Internet on a daily basis rely on you to not stop, not think, and to click links or open files immediately, without regard to the consequences of your actions. That’s how most people infect themselves. If you stop and think before you connect, you can prevent most of these infections yourself, simply by exercising a little restraint.

It’s hard to think of a major cybercrime outbreak over the past year that hasn’t relied, to some extent, on the naivete of its targets. Security professionals call these tricks “social engineering,” but that’s just a geeky term for criminal skullduggery that’s as common offline as online. The ruse almost always tries to invoke an adrenaline-fueled need for an immediate response — usually out of fear, greed, or panic — on the part of a victim. The victim ends up in a mental state where they are likely to make rash, impulsive decisions. And they do.

Putting the brakes on social engineering tricks usually takes all the steam out of them. To that end, I’d like to show you examples of five of the most common cyberscams that lead to the loss of personal information or sensitive data. Hopefully, if you know what to expect, you’ll simply walk away from the encounters unscathed.

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Malicious HTML Mail Attachments Flood Inboxes

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By Andrew Brandt

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If you hadn’t already noticed, an ongoing spam campaign where someone is sending email messages with attached HTML files continues to be a problem. The current campaign appears to be a new wave of spam similar to the one I reported about in July.

The messages, which began arriving a week ago, have subject lines pulled from news headlines (“Cops kill shooter at Johns Hopkins Hospital,” “America’s Got Talent Judges Were They Shocked,” “Daniel Covington”) and with a financial angle (“Apartment for rent,” “Invoice for Floor replacement,” “credit card,” and the ever-popular “Shipping Notification”).

The messages themselves are brief, such as the one shown above, and encourage the recipient to open the attached file.

Several readers have already sent me messages complaining about the volume, and asking what to do about the spam. My answer is the same with these spam messages as with any other spam messages: Delete them, mark them as spam, or do whatever you can to train your email spam filter to learn and block those messages.

One thing you should not do is open the HTML file.

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