New Malware Re-Writes Online Bank Statements to Cover Fraud

Very clever, what will they think of next. A girl I used to work with almost lost $8,000. Somehow someone in a different state got her bank information and tried to withdraw the money. The bank got suspicious and did not allow the withdrawal, but they froze her account until things could be straightened out and she was issued a new account number, etc. You almost need to be an IT professional to go online.

 

Computer illiterates will always fall victim to malware and phishing attacks. Sure, getting them off Windows will stop 90% of the problem, but if they are already that computer illiterate they will really have a hard time running anything else.

 

well there are 2 parts to this , technical & social/legal.

technical side :
Well almost anything viewable in a browser windows is "potentially" re-writable.
For example . You can run something called greasemonkey in FF and redraw how your gmail looks.
I'm not sure if its possible with secure sessions though


social/legal
In some countries the bank is liable for online fraud.
With my own bank , to set-up a wire transfer to a new account , requires a third form of authentication ( key-card) so I'd be ok with the attack as well.

 

This is the key sentence:

"The victims’ computers are infected with the Trojan, known as URLZone, after visiting compromised legitimate web sites or rogue sites set up by the hackers."

Answer: Don't get infected.

Point 2: The article does not elaborate on how exactly the infection occurs or how it's prevented. Furthermore, it's the victims' operating system, possibly Windows, that might get infected if improper privileges, patches, system configuration, and browser are used.

If you're running as limited user (or similar), have your system fully patched, use a good browser, and have your system configured to not allow all sorts of promiscuous activities, then you're not likely to get infected any time soon or ever. On Linux, Mac, this is even simpler.

Mrk

 

These articles always seem to leave out this rather important information.

Absolutely