CommunityDNS News Bits, July 2, 2009.
Provided by CommunityDNS, the information in this post consists of news items in the security-based Internet community.
Chinese Security Company Shares Huge Malware Database
KnownSec, a Chinese-based company, has developed a massive database of malware found on Chinese websites. With about ¼ of Chinese websites having a malicious reputation, phishing on the rise in China, password-stealing Trojans being China’s dominant type of malware and China producing the majority of the world’s malware, KnownSec scans nearly 2 million Chinese websites each day.
Click here for more information.
Stealthy click fraud tool exploits 9ball attack
Illustrating just how sophisticated hackers have become with their code, the latest grabs money without creating harm to the casual Internet user. “FFsearcher” is a Trojan that plugs into the Google API that allows webmasters to add a Google-powered search widget to their website. The widget is called “Google Custom Search”. The widget works by serving up search results alongside Google AdSense ads. With each click a visitor to the website makes on any of the ads, the owner of the website receives a small fee.
The trick? Each time a visitor clicks on an ad, the small fee is routed to the hacker and not the owner of the website. No harm comes to the unsuspecting visitor to the site.
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US Agencies Require Net Neutrality With Broadband Grants
Tasked with the distribution of roughly $7.2 billion dollars for broadband deployment, two US agencies have imposed net-neutrality clauses on grant applicants. In addition, US Vice President Biden announced another $4 billion in loans and grants whereby the grant applicants “not favor any lawful Internet applications or content over others”.
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Security guard charged with hacking hospital systems
The night-time security guard for a Dallas-based clinic was arrested for having installed malware on hospital systems. Having resigned from his post this person was set to hit the clinic with a massive DDoS attack the day after his last day on the job. He also compromised the HVAC system. Hospital officials now understand why the normal alarms did not go off during intermittent outages of their air conditioning system. This person was also found to have compromised computers used by the Dallas police and NASA.
How was he discovered? A leak to a security researcher from the hacker group. Further research turned up videos on YouTube showing the hacker displaying the HVAC consol and installing malware on one of the clinic’s PCs.
Comment: DDoS attack and manipulating with the air conditioning system that could damage medication? This is a great illustration of what could be done on a much larger scale, such as taking down a country’s power grid.
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Filed under: 9ball, Anycast, Block list, Bot, Botnet, Broadband, China, Communications Infrastructure, Community DNS, CommunityDNS, Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, DDoS, Denial of Service Attacks, Distributed Denial of Services, DNS, DoS, FFsearcher, Fiber, Hijacking, Infrastructure, malware, Phishing, Security, US Government | Leave a Comment
Tags: 9ball, AdSense, Anycast, Business Continuity, Business resilience, China, Click Fraud, CommunityDNS, Cyber Terrorism, Cyber Warfare, Cybercrime, Cyberwar, DDoS, DNS, DNS Resolution, DoS, FFsearcher, Global resolution, Google, Hacking, Internet, ISP, malware, Net Neutrality, Resolution Service, Security, U.S.
