UK police issue 'vicious' Trojan alert
Britain's top cybercrime fighters have joined up with the banking industry today in warning of the latest attempt to defraud online banking customers. The attacks, in the form of 'Trojan horse' emails, have been spammed out to a number of email account holders randomly across the country. The emails contain links to malicious websites in North America and China. The UK's National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) is working with the Internet industry to have these sites shut down. At the time of writing three have been taken out of commission but others remain active.
NHTCU and banking organisation APACS have teamed up to warn on the threat in a highly unusual move that underlines the seriousness of the risk. An NHTCU spokeswoman explained: "This is really vicious. It's just a normal phishing attack but something that tries to install backdoors on victims' PCs".
The spam emails contain details of a fictitious order for Web hosting or computer goods and thank the email recipient for a non-existent order. In addition, they also display the apparent cost that will be charged to their credit card. The email also contains a link to one of a number of maliciously constructed website in order to "view the order in more detail". If an email recipient is duped into visiting one of these sites, it appears merely as a site under construction. But in the background malign actions are afoot designed to load a variant of the Mitglieder proxy Trojan onto vulnerable Windows boxes.
