Crackers target to Beijing Olympics

Security company MessageLabs has recognized many trojan attacks which were related to Olympics theme.

- These attacks have been targeted to organizations which have very valuable and confidential information like army or goverment, says Alex Shipp from MessageLabs.

Different organizations have been approached by name of International Olympic Committee and email header has been related to eg. torch relay. Attackers have been identified to Asia and Pacific region.

Attacks have been usually targeted to only certain persons in organization, amount is limited and credibility is main thing there. Recently in USA was spread widely an email hoax targeted to big company leaders.

In these Olympic attacks have been used eg. Microsoft Office Database (mdb) files hidden in zip archive. After running of mdb file, it drops an infostealing exe file to computer.

Source: MessageLabs

Cracker site infects for money

PC World has interviewed researchers who have found a East European site which asks 0,2 $ / infected computer. Prepayment is also possible; you can buy eg. for 10000 infections for 2000 $.

After infection site sends purchaser IP addresses of infected machines that cracker knows where to attack. That site doesn't offer exploits or viruses but cracker can choose means freely.

Researchers believe that botnet can have millions of computers inside.

PC World warns that you shouldn't visit loads.cc as it might log IP addresses. There was found no malicious code on front page but that doesn't guarantee that also other pages there are clean.

Source: PC World