According to a new report from security firm Finjan, that due to the rise of sophisticated trading platforms designed to facilitate the sale of access to hacked PCs for stealing user data, sending spam, and other malicious tasks.
"Criminals have built an eBay that provides everything to the hacker," Finjan CTO Yuval Ben-Itzhak told InternetNews.com. "People are not even aware their computer is controlled and is an asset that one person is buying and another is selling."
Finjan examined in detail a platform called the Golden Cash network and botnet, where criminals sell infected PCs that include government and corporate computers, not just home users' PCs, according to Ben-Itzhak.
He said that one criminal might install scareware on a PC, steal a user's credit card information, and sell the PC to someone else who would install malware that would lurk and steal e-mail accounts, or who would wait until the user logged in to their bank account and steal that, as well.
Then that criminal could sell the PC to a third person, who would use it to send spam.
As a result, users should not assume they're safe even while behind the corporate firewall.
"It's a big mistake," Ben-Itzhak said. "Earlier this year ... we reported a botnet of 2 million PCs [and] there were many government-owned PCs and many PCs of public companies on the list. The assumption that all businesses and governments are using the best antivirus technology and are therefore secure is far from the reality. They have more resources and more people but they also have many more PCs to protect."
http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/3825491
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment