Cyber Crime

Pierluigi Paganini April 23, 2013
New wave of DDoS against EU Banking can hide a sinister mystery

In the last months of 2012 a group of hackers known as “Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters” conducted a series of attacks against principal banking and financial institutions including the U.S. Bancorp, JPMorgan Chase&co, Bank of America, PNC Financial Fervices Group, and SunTrust Banks. Security experts noted that the hackers adopted an anomalous strategy for the […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 22, 2013
HTTP-Botnets: The Dark Side of a Standard Protocol!

When the HTTP protocol was born in 1999, no one ever thought it will be used by one of the most dangerous Cyber threats called Botnet. A bot is an application that can perform and repeat a particular task faster than a human. When a large number of bots infect different targets (e.g. Computers and […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 20, 2013
Group-IB detected malware that hit Russian stock-trading platform

Security firm Group-IB has detected a new variant of malware that targets the popular Russian stock-trading platform QUIK (Quik Broker, Quik Dealer) provided by Russian software developers ARQA Technologies. The malware has been used during various attacks staring in last November (2012) with the purpose to gather detailed information on the respective owners of the accounts. […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 18, 2013
Anonymous #OpIsrael, use of botnets & hypothesis on attackers

We all remember the debated attacks of Anonymous collective against Israeli government that targeted various websites of the country last April 7th. The data on the cyber attacks reported by Israel government are really different from the one provided by the group of hacktivists in the damage report for #OpIsrael that account for a Total […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 17, 2013
In the mind of cybercriminals – The Boston Marathon attack

To fight the cybercrime we must start thinking like criminals, they are people motivated solely by money and the need to monetize every operation. I wrote, like many other colleagues, various articles on phishing attacks and their potential effects, of course the success of this attack is based on the capacity of attackers to deceive […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 16, 2013
DHS alerted energy companies on ongoing spear-phishing campaign

Cyber espionage is considerable as  one of the most aggressive and dangerous cyber threats, its silent operation could steal sensitive information, company secrets and intellectual properties for a long time. Recently many cyber espionage campaigns have been discovered, last in order of time is the Winnti campaign but we cannot forted also Red October and […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 15, 2013
Bitcoin in the storm and cybercrime try to take advantage of it

As can be imagined and anticipated the soar of Bicoin value has attracted the interest of cybercrime, recently we read of malware authors and botmasters that trying to exploit new and old channels to steal virtual currency or mine it using computational resources of the victims. Security experts from Kaspersky Lab found variant of malware spread via […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 10, 2013
How cybercrime uses a compromised Skype account

In various articles I wrote on the large diffusion of botnets and the capabilities of malicious agents to use as spread channel the social media platforms or popular applications. The diffusion and management of a botnet architecture has never been so easy, the underground offer covers every need and provides advanced customization services. Security expert […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 09, 2013
Wandering in the underground, from exploit kits to hacking services

The cybercrime industry knows no crisis, new services are offered in the underground and criminals operating in different sectors are increasing their interest in the possibility to adopt cyber tools to organize prolific scam and fraud. Underground offers everything necessary to commit a cyber crime, from tools for hacking services and in many cases all is […]

Pierluigi Paganini April 08, 2013
Cybercrime follows money, malware for Bitcoin mining spread via Skype

Recently I wrote an article related the link between the soar of Bicoin value and expected increased interest of cybercrime to the virtual currency. In the post I anticipated the we will assist to the increase of DDoS attacks and data breach against principal Bitcoin exchanges and services providers, I also introduced the possibility to […]