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Monday November 23, 2009 3:32 PM AEST
Skip Navigation LinksPC Authority > News > Online banking at high risk from attack that knows your bank
Online banking at high risk from attack that knows your bank
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Online banking at high risk from attack that knows your bank

by Daniel Long  on Jun 29, 2009
There is a risk of banking websites falling prey to a new form of malicious keyboard logger, but there is a way to reduce your risk

Away from the physical world of ATM skimming practices, it's the online domain where criminals are continuing to refine the way they steal your personal banking data.

According to a current banking threat detailed by one of Kaspersky's leading chief security experts, banking websites are at significant risk of being attacked by ingenious malware scripts that can remember passwords entered by customers, using a clever screenshot tactic which reports details of the victim's passwords back to the attacker.

Special types of malware are being developed just for breaking the passwords found on different internet banking sites.

"Most of the banking fraud happening at the moment online is with Trojan horses. There's quite a lot of it that will hijack your online banking connection with different types of banks", says Costin Raiu, who forms part of the Global research and analytics team at Kaspersky Lab.

Raiu specialises in internet banking attacks and is based in Romania, a hub of activity in the banking fraud business. So if anyone should know, it's Raiu.

The banking threat that knows your bank intimately

Raiu brings up an example of just far online criminals have come in the past few years; a new piece of banking malware originating from China that currently knows how to target over 1,000 internet banking websites across the world.

The process is deceptively simple, once an attacker plants the seed to monitor your connection. This can happen when you click on a bad website link or open a various forms of email attachments, particularly PDF files that carry some of the highest security risks online.

"They can (the criminals) monitor all your connections....and they have templates", says Raiu.  It's these templates that are form fitted to provide the perfect fit for online fraudsters in a bid to find a way to circumnavigate your system and your specific banking website.

"They match those templates to what the bank is sending to identify the fields that they need to steal", he says.

And if your bank isn't featured in one of those templates? Then the bad guys just get around this by sending an update to retrieve the required data, like any other piece of software.

"If they find that the bank does not match the template, they will query for an updated module for this specific bank. We've seen this in Germany recently where a bank changed their online banking website specifically so it will not work anymore with these Trojans", says Raiu.

 

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