| Cracking from Russia |
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| Thursday, 25 January 2007 | ||||
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Last week it was discovered a $1 million online banking theft against the Scandinavian bank Nordea. The attack was traced to a Russian cracker known by the handle “the Corpse.” Both the attacker’s identity and the nature of the virus are still under investigation, we just know that the virus is a Trojan horse which works by logging the passwords entered by banking customers. The Trojan seems to be a variant of the Haxdoor Trojan that already infected over 2300 computers last October. This version of the Haxdoor Trojan was activated when a customer typed the bank’s address into a browser. Passwords were then recorded and used to get the access to online banking accounts. Later, money was transferred to new accounts and cash was finally withdrawn.
According to the Washington Post, The Corpse is likely to be the author of the original version of Haxdoor and of many new versions such as A311 Death and Nuclear Grabber that are now available for sale on a Russian web site. As confirmed by virus researchers at Kaspersky Labs in Moscow, The Corpse is known as a virus developer who usually sells his “products” to crackers. This means that he could not be directly involved in the fraud to the Swedish bank. The fraud hit 250 customers of Nordea in 15 months, but the bank’s spokesmen declared that only the users who hadn’t provided proper protection to their computers were involved in the swindle. Anyway, the bank provided compensation to it customers. According to Swedish police the Trojan horse was distributed with spam e-mail and it was designed to attack customers of many European and American banks. Police also declared that they have already arrested a number of people (both from Sweden and from abroad) who tried to withdrew cash from Nordea branches after making online transfers. During police interrogations it was also discovered that some of the money was sent to Russia and that the stolen passwords were first transmitted to a server located in the USA but they were then forwarded to a computer server in Russia. This case highlighted again the situation of Russian underground community, that is backed by a strong tradition and interest in computer sciences but it is not supported by an effective regulation: a combination that encouraged the development of a structured and skilled community of cyber pirates.
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Dire straits for Swedish subjects’ online affairs.
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