In a recent in-depth threat analysis conducted by eBay, the results showed that online phisers are getting more organized,  with some of them even getting funding to develop sophisticated malware that attacks innocent Internet users.

Last week alone, some 1,200 eBay users were victimized by this organized phising attack when an anonymous poster in the eBay Trust & Safety discussion forum posted members’ data of eBay users.

eBay’s chief information and security officer Dave Cullinane, in a Microsoft-sponsored Symposium said that eBay had uncovered quite a number of hacked, botnet computer during their study. Cullinane also said that phising emails had become more sophisticated and had become harder to detect.

Retelling his experience in battling phisers at his previous job with Washington Mutual, Cullinane said he was shocked to find that the majority of phising threats were caused by rootkitted Linux boxes rather than by Microsoft boxes.

Linux is a very stable platform and this makes it a favorite target of  phishers, rather than the easier-to-hack Microsoft Microsoft’s platform. When phising boxes utilized a rootkit software, attacks could be very hard to detect. Linux machine users won’t even notice that their machines are being attacked.

The underlying capabilities of Linux powered machines have earned the respect and attention of advanced hackers and phishers making these machines highly coveted by cyber criminals, and compromised Linux machines pay a handsome price in the underground market.

Alfred Huger, vice president for Symantec Security Response, also sees a lot of Linux machines being used in phishing. “We see them as part of the command and control networks for botnets, but we rarely see them be the actual bots. Botnets are almost uniformly Windows-based,” says Huger.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, October 6th, 2007 at 9:00 am under Linux, Malware.  Print This Post

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