Friday, 23 November 2007

Upsurge in Attacks for Stealing Personal Banking Details

Attacks against banking sites, targeting personal user data have seen a spike. These attacks use a new generation of malicious codes, in a technique called “Man in the Browser”.

According to security solutions provider F-Secure, techniques used by cyber criminals to steal personal and banking data have become increasingly sophisticated, in order to adapt in turn to the growing sophistication of the security solutions.

The latest technique, “Man in the Browser”, works such that once the PC has been infected, the malicious code is only triggered when the web user visits his online bank site. This type of malware is capable of retrieving the information (login and password) that is entered by the web user on the real web page of the bank site by intercepting the HTML code on his web browser. This personal data is then sent directly to an FTP site where the cyber criminal stores it, before selling it on to the highest bidder on other web sites used by cyber-criminals.

“With the enhancements that banks have deployed in terms of authentication security on their online banking sites, phishing attacks are becoming less and less effective, and attacks of the ‘Man in the Browser’ type are set to increase,” says Mikko Hypponen, the Chief Research Officer at F-Secure.

F-Secure believes that security products using behavioral analysis are the best solution against such attacks, as the malicious codes are designed specifically for certain banking sites. They are not distributed en masse, unlike attacks using phishing, for example. This restricted distribution constitutes a real challenge for security software publishers when it comes to referencing these viruses and using signature recognition.