Tag: financial
5 Mandatory Steps For Protecting Data From Eavesdroppers
Chris Dougherty VirtualThreat Contributing Writer Every day we hear news reports in the mainstream media about social network hacking, malware, malicious account takeovers and protecting data. It doesn’t matter if you are the average Joe Blow or a huge corporation like Burger King, everyone is being targeted these days. Cyber criminals are searching for everything from [...]
Anonymous Hackers Target CEOs in Operation Wall Street
Chris Dougherty VirtualThreat Contributing Writer Anonymous hackers have launched ‘Operation Wall Street’, a new protest started by the loosely organized hactivist collective against the US government, Wall Street and the financial services industry. The operation is a call to all Anonymous “members” and citizens of the world and seeks justice for the “innocent and exploited people being forced into homelessness” [...]
Anonymous Hackers Release Data for 4000 US Bank Officials
Jeb Boone Global Post Anonymous hackers released user and personal information belonging to 4,000 US community bank executives, in an escalation in their online battle against the US Department of Justice. Anonymous released the security credentials for over 4,000 US bank executives on Monday, posting their user account information, passwords and personal information online [...]
How Cyber Criminals Are Exploiting Our Swipe-n-Go Society
Chris Dougherty VirtualThreat Contributing Writer Curtis Abernathy, a small business owner in Arizona, never expected to be caught up as the victim of an international ring of cyber criminals stealing identities online. But that’s exactly what happened last week when he received a call from Bank of America’s security office. The bank’s security team [...]
Chinese Hackers To Blame For One Third of Global Cyberattacks
Michelle Florcruz International Business Times Though the story of computer network attacks by Communist spies sounds like a plot line from a Hollywood action film, a new report has found that one-third of cyberattacks actually originate in China. According to Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM), a digital technology platform developer, China accounted for 33 percent of [...]
Feds Say Cyber Crime Ring Targeted U.S. Bank Accounts
Andrew Tangel LA Times A cyber crime case brought by U.S. prosecutors in New York may add to the fears of anyone who banks online. The charges against three foreign nationals — a Russian, a Latvian and a Romanian — allege they were involved in creating and distributing a computer virus that infected more than 40,000 [...]
Hackers Pay Big Money to Use New Exploit Kit
John Lister InfoPackets The group behind a collection of ‘premium’ hacking tools is apparently charging hackers $10,000 a month for permission to use their exploit kit. The proceeds are helping fund rewards for anyone who shares information with the hackers about previously unknown software vulnerabilities. According to security firm Sophos, the ‘premium’ hacking kit [...]
Al-Qaeda Linked to New York Phone Hacking Scams
Chris Dougherty VirtualThreat Contributing Writer Hackers with ties to Al-Qaeda terrorist cells in Somalia and the Philippines are targeting New York small businesses using international phone hacking scams. The scams are costing the companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in phone charges each month. Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) said that the hacker group has a [...]
Android Malware Steals Bank Data From Your Phone
Lucian Constantin PC World Several malicious Android apps designed to steal mobile transaction authentication numbers (mTANs) sent by banks to their customers over SMS (Short Message Service) were found on Google Play by researchers from antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab. The Android malware apps were created by a gang that uses a variant of the [...]
Criminals Targeting Holiday Shoppers With Dexter Malware
Chris Dougherty Virtual Threat Contributing Writer As the Christmas season and holiday shopping hits full swing, cyber criminals are using sophisticated attacks to steal your money and credit card data. The latest scheme infects cash register machines with a malicious piece of software called Dexter malware. Seculert, an Israeli security firm, has identified a [...]
Warning: Massive Bank Cyber Attacks Are Being Planned
David Goldman CNN Money Security firm McAfee on Thursday released a report warning that massive bank cyber attacks on 30 U.S. banks has been planned, with the goal of stealing millions of dollars from consumers’ bank accounts. McAfee’s research upheld an October report from RSA, the security wing of IT giant EMC Corp. RSA [...]
Facebook Hackers Busted in $850 Million Theft
Fernando Alfonso III Daily Dot Facebook has worked with the FBI to take down 10 Facebook hackers responsible for stealing $850 million over the last two years. The hackers from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, New Zealand, Peru, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. were responsible for “more than 11 million compromised computer systems [...]
Silent Attackers Are Hacking Smart TVs
Darlene Storm Computerworld Hacking Smart TVs? Can you imagine your “smart” TV being targeted by a zero-day exploit, becoming part of a botnet, or being used to conduct espionage? How about if the TV manufacturer, an attacker, or even the CIA were to hijack the video camera in the TV? Suddenly, as you watch TV in [...]
Five Week Financial Cyber Attack Against Largest US Banks Continues
Chris Dougherty VirtualThreat Contributing Writer For five weeks now some of the largest banks in the United States, including HSBC, Capitol One and BB&T, have been under a sustained cyber attack from unidentified hackers. The attackers are using denial of service (DOS) attacks to cripple access to the banks’ websites. In a phone interview [...]
Be Warned: Your Computer May Be Stealing Your Money
Jerome Taylor The Independent Stealing your money? Cyber-security experts sound alarm over growing prevalence of sophisticated malware. Almost a third of all fraudulent banking transactions now originate from the customer’s own computer, as cyber criminals use increasingly sophisticated malware to hijack accounts, online security specialists warned yesterday. To combat the ever-present threat of online [...]
Iran Cyberattacks Target Persian Gulf Gas and Oil Companies
CBS News Iran Cyberattacks Target Persian Gulf . A former U.S. government official says American authorities firmly believe that Iranian hackers, likely supported by the Tehran government, were responsible for recent cyberattacks against oil and gas companies in the Persian Gulf and that they appeared to be in retaliation for the latest round of U.S. [...]
Twitter Hacking Victims Find Their Accounts On Black Market
Gerry Smith Huffington Post Eric Weaver tried logging in to his Twitter account this summer, but he was locked out. A hacker had broken into his account and changed the password. But it didn’t end there. With a little digging, Weaver found that his Twitter handle — @weave — was being sold in an [...]
U.S. Bank Website Hackers Used Advanced Botnets, Diverse Tools
Joseph Menn Reuters (Reuters) – The Iranian hackers behind the cyber attacks on major U.S. banks have repeatedly disrupted online banking by using sophisticated and diverse tools that point to a carefully coordinated campaign, according to security researchers. The hackers, believed to be activists in the Middle East, were highly knowledgeable about the [...]
Hacked Bitcoin Exchange Open For Business Again
FineExtra Hacked Bitcoing exchange, Bitfloor, the Bitcoin exchange that shut down earlier this month after hackers compromised its servers and stole around $250,000 in the virtual currency, has reopened for trading. In a Google+ post, founder Roman Shtylman has confirmed that the exchange is now back up and running after nearly a month out [...]
Top 15 Tips to Create Strong Passwords, FREE Secure Password Generator
Chris Dougherty Virtual Threat Contributing Writer You can use our FREE Secure Password Generator to create a new password now. Top 15 Tips to Create Strong Passwords Today’s digital world brings new conveniences and entertainment in the form of online shopping, banking and social networking sites. With these conveniences there are also new threats [...]
Hackers Are Playing The Game For Big Money Jackpots
Tomer Teller CNBC Back in 2010, the FBI joined law enforcement agencies across the globe in shutting down a criminal operation that stole some $70 million from U.S. banks. The gang’s weapon of choice was not a machine gun or a set of safe-cracking tools. Instead, the gang relied on the infamous ZeuS Trojan [...]
NYTimes.com Site Vulnerability Allows Attacker to Post Fake Story
Chris Dougherty Virtual Threat Contributing Writer In this day and age we all depend heavily on the Internet and social networking to stay informed about important happenings around the world and in our own communities. What many people may not realize is the fact that there is a cyber war occurring beneath the covers [...]
Android Smartphone Hackers Building Malware in Russia
Antone Gonsalves CSO The malware business growing around Google Android — now the leading smartphone operating system — is still in its infancy. Today, many of the apps built to steal money from Android users originate from Russia and China, so criminal gangs there have become cyber-trailblazers. Sophos and Symantec on Wednesday released their [...]
Cyber Spies Are Exploiting Your Mac and Windows Computers
Antone Gonsalves CSO Cyber spies have planted Java- and Flash-exploiting malware on Web sites focused on human rights, defense and foreign policy. Over the last two weeks, the Shadowserver Foundation, a nonprofit group that tracks Internet threats, has discovered several such compromised Web sites that download the malware through visitors’ browsers. The malware, which [...]
10 Hacking Incidents That Made History
Joan Goodchild PC Advisor – UK Hacking has been around for decades. Today’s crimes are often financially-motivated fraud. Here are ten hacking incidents that made history In our first Rogues Gallery, we looked at ten infamous social engineers – con men who exploited human weaknesses rather than technical vulnerabilities. But there have been computer and network hacks [...]
