Hackers steal more than $450,000 from Burlington city bank

The city of Burlington is warning its employees to check their bank accounts after finding out funds have been stolen. The Skagit Valley Herald reports the money was electronically transferred to various personal and business accounts throughout the United States during a two-day period this week.

  
We really don't know exactly how it happened," said City Manager Bryan Harrison. "Multiple banks in multiple states involved." "Someone, either through the city system or Bank of America had actually accessed our electric authorization account."

The theft was first reported by the Skagit Valley Herald newspaper which said that Burlington’s finance department reported the theft Thursday. Police and the Secret Service are investigating. Burlington is a city of about 8,400 people roughly 60 miles north of Seattle.

They believe the money has been shifted to different banks around the world. Officials say they will recover the money that was stolen, and that it will not affect city business

Anonymous Hackers dumps 600k Emails from most popular Israeli web portal

As part of  Operation Israel (#OpIsrael) Anonymous Hackers once again strike on Israeli infrastructure by dumping the 600,000 emails and passwords from one of the most popular Israeli web portal 'Walla', which is know for providing news, search and e-mail system, among other things.

Anonymous Activist knows 'AnonSabre' dumped email addresses, password MD5 hashes and salts across 95 Pastebin posts containing this sensitive information have been published over the course of 24 hours.

Walla also confirmed that the list was posted online, but they said that the information leaked by Hacker is Useless because the password posted by hacker is in Encrypted form. 

I think, they are not aware about fastest MD5 cracker 'oclhashcat' or other cloud based cracking services, anyway they also said,“However, we are working on 'hermetically' sealing off user details in Walla! accounts,”.

The #OpIsrael campaign was announced last December, and according to Anonymous, is for the “children and families in Gaza that are suffering as a result of the policies of the Israeli government.”

As part of the campaign, hackers took down the Israeli military spokesperson’s website, and hacked into the Israeli Vice Prime Minister’s site in past months.

Facebook hacked in Zero-Day Attack

Facebook operator of the largest social network with more than 1 billion members, said on Friday it had been the target of an unidentified hacker group, but that no user information was compromised during the attack.

The attack occurred when a handful of the company's employees visited a developer's compromised website, which led to malware being installed on their laptops.

‘Last month, Facebook Security discovered that our systems had been targeted in a sophisticated attack,’ read thestatement, despite the laptops being ‘fully-patched and running up-to-date anti-virus software.’

Reports say Facebook knew about the attacks, which likely exploited a zero-day Java software flaw, well before the announcement.

"We are working continuously and closely with our own internal engineering teams, with security teams at other companies, and with law enforcement authorities to learn everything we can about the attack, and how to prevent similar incidents in the future," Facebook said on its website.

Facebook was not alone in this attack, Twitter social network, said earlier this month that it had been hacked, and thatapproximately 2,50,000 user accounts were potentially compromised, with attackers gaining access to information including user names and email addresses.

Hackers deface Hostgator Indian domain

Hacking group 'today hack and deface Hostgator Indian domain Hostgator.in , which handles the Indian Operations ofHostgator.com with locally available servers and localized currency billing as well as support.

Rather than editing homepage or other pages of site, hacker just added new file at on ftp with defacement purpose. At the time of writing, the page has been removed by firm but we had taken a screenshot this morning as shown below:

The defacement page ends with message,"We Are Anonymous". No doubt that group have nothing to do with Hacktivist group Anonymous, but may be they use this term just for fun.

Zeus Trojan History

Zeus       is a Trojan horse that steals banking information by Man-in-the-browser keystroke logging and Form Grabbing. Zeus is spread mainly through drive-by downloads and phishing schemes. First identified in July 2007 when it was used to steal information from the United States Department of Transportation, it became more widespread in March 2009. In June 2009, security company Prevx discovered that Zeus had compromised over 74,000 FTP accounts on websites of such companies as the Bank of America, NASA, Monster.com, ABC, Oracle, Play.com, Cisco, Amazon, and BusinessWeek.
The various Zeus' botnets are estimated to include millions of compromised computers (around 3.6 million in the United States).As of October 28, 2009 over 1.5 million phishing messages were sent on Facebook with the purpose of spreading the Zeus' trojan. On November 3, 2009 a British couple was arrested for allegedly using Zeus to steal personal data. From November 14–15, 2009 Zeus spread via e-mails purporting to be from Verizon Wireless. A total of nine million of these phishing e-mails were sent.
In 2010 there were reports of various attacks, among which one, in July, disclosed by security firm Trusteer, indicating that the credit cards of more than 15 unnamed US banks were compromised.
On October 1, 2010, FBI announced it had discovered a major international cyber crime network which had used Zeus to hack into US computers and steal around $70m. More than 90 suspected members of the ring were arrested in the US, and arrests were also made in the UK and Ukraine.
In May 2011, the then-current version of Zeus's source code was leaked and in October the abuse.ch blog reported about a new custom build of the trojan that relies on more sophisticated peer-to-peer capabilities.

Proliferation

The Zeus Trojan-controlled machines are in 196 countries, including isolated states such as North Korea. The five countries with the most significant instances of infected machines are Egypt, the United States, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. Altogether, 2,411 companies and organizations are said to have been affected by the criminal operations running the botnet.

Targeted Operating Systems

Zeus targets Microsoft Windows machines. It does not work on Mac OS X, or Linux.
In 2012, Kaspersky Lab researchers discovered five new variants of Zeus that infected BlackBerry and Android phones.

Targeted information

Every criminal can control which information he's interested in and fine tune his copy of Zeus to only steal those. Examples include login credentials for online social networks, e-mail accounts, online banking or other online financial services. The top sites with stolen login credentials, according to Netwitness' report are Facebook, Yahoo, Hi5, Metroflog, Sonico and Netlog.

Removal and detection

Zeus is very difficult to detect even with up-to-date antivirus software due to being stealthy. This is the primary reason why its malware family is considered the largest botnet on the Internet: Some 3.6 million PCs are said to be infected in the U.S. alone. Security experts are advising that businesses continue to offer training to users to prevent them from clicking hostile or suspicious links in emails or on the web while also keeping up with antivirus updates. Symantec claims its Symantec Browser Protection can prevent "some infection attempts" but it remains unclear if modern antivirus software is effective at preventing all of its variants from taking root.

FBI crackdown

FBI: The Zeus Fraud Scheme

In October 2010, FBI announced that using Zeus, hackers in Eastern Europe managed to infect computers around the world. The virus was disseminated in an e-mail, and when targeted individuals at businesses and municipalities opened the e-mail, the trojan software installed itself on the victimized computer, secretly capturing passwords, account numbers, and other data used to log into online banking accounts.
The hackers then used this information to take over the victims’ bank accounts and make unauthorized transfers of thousands of dollars at a time, often routing the funds to other accounts controlled by a network of money mules. Many of the U.S. money mules were recruited from overseas. They created bank accounts using fake documents and phony names. Once the money was in their accounts, the mules could either wire it back to their bosses in Eastern Europe, or turn it into cash and smuggle it out of the country. For their work, they were paid a commission.
More than 100 people were arrested on charges of conspiracy to commit bank fraud and money laundering. Of those, over 90 were in US, and the other arrests were made in UK and Ukraine.
Before they were caught, members of the theft ring managed to steal $70 million.

Retirement

In late 2010, a number of Internet security vendors including McAfee and Internet Identity claimed that the creator of Zeus had said that he was retiring and had given the source code and rights to sell Zeus to his biggest competitor, the creator of the SpyEye trojan. However, those same experts warned the retirement was a ruse and expect the cracker to return with new tricks.
As of 13 May 2011, the source code and compiled binaries are found to be hosted on GitHub

Zeus banking Trojan in Japan

Zeus continues to strike online bank accounts and users, and technology designed to thwart these Trojan attacks continually fails to keep up. Symantec recently came across a new Zeus file targeting five major banks in Japan.

The malware, which has caused serious problems to banking customers in Europe and the U.S, now having maximum concentration on Japanese banks. Target information was reveled by Symantec after decryption of configuration file from new sample. The attacker uses Blackhole exploit kit in order to install Zeus

eus, a financially aimed malware, comes in many different forms and flavors. It can be tweaked to hijack personal PCs, or come in the form of a keylogger that tracks keystrokes as users enter them.

But once installation over, Zeus malware aims to steal online-banking credentials, and phishing schemes and drive-by downloads are most often the avenues hackers use to spread this increasingly sophisticated and evolving Trojan.

In this case, the functionality is the same as that of other Zeus variants. Once infected, Zeus monitors the Web browser visiting the targeted banks and injects HTML code that displays a message in Japanese that states in English: "In order to provide a better service to our customers, we are updating our personal internet banking system. Please re-enter the information that you provided when you first registered.".

Zeus gained notoriety in 2006 as being the tool of choice for criminals stealing online banking credentials. If your are one of the victim of Zeus, we recommend that you change your passwords for your online accounts and if you have used your credit card while Zeus Trojan was on your computer, contact the bank and let them know that you might be be victim of a phishing attack.

Google Play privacy issue, sends app buyers personal details to developers

Google is again under attack for its apparent mishandling of its users’ personal information. An Australian software developer 'Dan Nolan' revealed that the search giant was sending him the full names, email and post codes of everyone who purchased his app on Google's Play.merchant account to update his payment details
The main problem is that Google is not asking explicit permission from buyers to share that information with developers, but according to privacy groups and with careful inspection of the policies, Google does not clearly mention that it is sharing personal information to app developers nor does it create a good deal of effort in informing buying customers.

The sign-up process for Google Wallet tells prospective users that they will need to share some basic information with merchants to conduct their transactions. But from a practical point of view, many people seemed blindsided by the news that their information was being shared. There was a mention that developers could take any type of personal information and still sell it to another party.

Last year, Google was accused of violating the consent order by placing tracking cookies on the computers of Safari users, despite telling those same users they would be automatically opted-out of such tracking. Google agreed to pay a record $22.5 million to the FTC.