Fergie's Tech Blog

'Crimeware' Server Exposes Breadth of Data Theft

William Jackson writes on GCN.com:

Last month Researchers at online security company Finjan uncovered a 1.4 gigabyte cache of stolen data from North America, Europe, the Middle East and India on a Malaysian server that provided command and control functions for malware attacks in addition to being a drop site for data harvested from compromised computers.

“This is a unique example of what we have been talking about for the last year,” said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technical officer at Finjan. Online thieves are using sophisticated tools to plant malicious code on legitimate Web pages, compromising visiting PCs and stealing data.

The data included 5,388 unique log files collected in just a three-week period. The files included personal and business e-mails, medical records, and financial log-in and transaction information with not only credit card and account numbers but also passwords and security codes. Although the trend of using Web exploits to steal and market personal data has been identified for some time, the discovery of the cache still was an eye-opener, Ben-Itzhak said.

posted by Fergie @ 5/06/2008 06:53:00 PM