Spam gang taps the power of ZeuS to boost cybercrime earnings
As reported previously by Infosecurity, the Anti-Phishing Working Group reported back in May that the Avalanche Group were responsible for two third of all detected phishing attacks in Q3 and Q4 of 2009.
In its analysis of the trend, meanwhile, Imperva says that the attack vectors used by the Avalanche botnet gang – who have taken two years to migrate to the new fraud architecture – indicate that criminal hackers are now using lateral thinking to develop their fraudulent modus operandi.
Amichai Shulman, Imperva's chief technology officer, said that the gang is using advanced programming techniques. "The problem is that the banks, not the users, are realising that the client browser is actually under the control of the hacker. So although a user is in fact authenticated to the bank, all transactions are actually being performed from that moment on by the Trojan", he explained.
