Saturday
Oct 11th
| The sword of insecurity |
Page 2 of 4 There are actually two issues which have an adverse impact on those who rely on the internet, and on-line trade, and they are: 1. As with any business venture that attracts finance, organised crime (ecrime) has increased its focus and interest on this area, targeting both home and business user. 2. Whatever the user type, they do not always deploy adequate levels of security, so by inference are left exposed. ecrime Consider the current threats, ranging from phishing, a practice aiming to fool the user into utilising a spoofed site to conduct some form of transaction, exposing sensitive information to non-authorised persons (criminals). There are also a series of other attacks which ecrime gangs may leverage to circumvent end user security, and these range from compromising the end of line device (say the PC), and then installing some form of Trojan code onto the machines to gather information, or maybe even recruit the machine into what is termed a BotNet, which may be used to participate in a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a specific target, a criminal speciality normally aimed at business environments. Recent advances of new tactics supporting ecrime have enhanced the objective of the end criminal intent, and are getting even more sophisticated, using a configurations referred to as Rock-phish. At time of writing, the most recent case of an identified Rock-phishing attack was mounted against on-line credit-agency in October 2007 with some success, causing internet serving hardware to crash and burn, creating a business related outage resulting in loss of revenue. In simple terms a Rock phish requires ownership of multiples of domain names, which are normally nonsensical, e.g. dio666.org. These are then constructed into spam email which creates the look and feel of a genuine communication. Underlying the Rock phish attack is the use of wildcard DNS, which is employed to resolve to variations of IP addresses, and then mapping them over to a dynamic gathering of compromised machines. Clearly space in this article will not allow further expansion in depth, but what this does mean in terms of threat vectors is, Rock phishing sites are much more durable, and harder to take down, and have an average time to live/trade up-time of more than 160 hours. There are also other advances in the world of ecrime which support the potential for higher success rates in the world of criminal profitability, another example being fast-flux domains. |
||||||
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
FOUNDING PARTNER
PARTNERS
OOPS. Your Flash player is missing or outdated.Click here to update your player so you can see this content.
News Feeds
Copyright © 2005 - 2008 LeadSure.
Comany No 06216310
