This weekend, while the Anonymous people were DDoSing the Spanish Police web site in what they call “peaceful protests” (are they ignorant or just cynical?) another news came out: the International Money Found was hacked, and had been compromised for months. Shocking news 🙂
As soon as it was made public all media start talking about that, being in the front page of every news site. Even though there are no details on the attack, speculation started talking about a “foreign country” being behind the attack, many fingers pointing at China (as usual :)) and talking about cyberwarfare. It makes sense that such an institution can be a target, even though 187 countries belong to the IMF they could want to have a VIP access to obtain certain information.
But it also makes sense that this is not a targeted attack. Imagine someone working for the IMF (let’s call him Dominique, just a random name) enjoyed watching hot girls, went to some website of questionable reputation 😉 and tried to install some video codecs to watch some video, getting infected with a Zeus like Trojan. Since that moment, Dominique’s computer was compromised, and his personal info -well, better said ALL the information he had access to- was being stolen.
This happens everyday in thousands of computers. So we’ll have to wait until some real information is disclosed, meanwhile take care or you could be the next Dominique!
Panda Security specializes in the development of endpoint security products and is part of the WatchGuard portfolio of IT security solutions. Initially focused on the development of antivirus software, the company has since expanded its line of business to advanced cyber-security services with technology for preventing cyber-crime.
4 comments
THX for your opinin.
yes the spanisch thing is very sad for anon
but
BTT:
can it be someone played with SET and soem pdf´s do get a shell?
You need to read the information before commenting on something. You can’t just rant and speculate based upon the headline. If you had read any of the in-depth articles you would have seen that the attacks weren’t random pwnage, they were targeted spear phishing (that’s what spear phishing is, right, as opposed to just phishing).
Spear phishing means that someone researches the target, gathers specific information about employees in the organization and crafts specific emails designed to be opened by those individuals based upon that research. This is not script kiddie pr0n coded pwnage.
If you went on further to look at the pattern of like institutions which have been targeted by very similar types of attacks you might concede that there is more than a thread of commonality.
You are doing no one any favors by discounting these attacks as user error or random drive-by pwnage.
Hi Robin, thanks for your comment. I read everything that was out there, maybe I missed something, but if that was the case I’m sure you would have pointed me to the right place, but I see you don’t provide any source of information. Quoting the New York Times:
So it is just speculation. As I said in my article, it makes sense that such an institution can be a target, but that’s it, it’s not a fact, we’ll have to wait for more information to know what kind of attack has taken place.
Sure, wait and see. Without any accurate information so far, we may imagine it was this type of simple -and unfortunately so common- attack reliable on human flaw…