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Attackers Don't Stop
When it comes to high-tech fraud, one of the most common scams is "phishing." The bad guys who do it send out bogus e-mails in hopes of scaring, enticing or just tricking the naive into giving up personal information at fake websites that resemble those of legitimate financial institutions and other commercial outfits.The volume of phishing e-mail has reached astounding levels. The software company Symantec (of Norton fame) pegged traffic last year at 1.5 billion messages a day; less than half were blocked before reaching their destinations. Gartner, a market-research firm, reports that in the 12 months ending in May 2005, phishers duped 2.4 million Americans into revealing personal info, costing victims, banks and credit card companies $929 million.
The good news: Computer users are getting better at telling the difference between real and fake e-mail. The bad news: Phishermen are adapting.
"Attackers are not going to stop," says Dave Cole, a Symantec director. "They're going to go after other applications."
Maybe you've heard of "pharming," in which legitimate websites are hit with malicious computer code that steers those visiting them to lookalike sites. Data can then be harvested without a key being struck. In a twist, there's crimeware that instead attacks browsers (Internet Explorer, for one) and does its pharming from there.
Among the most insidious new cons: "keystroke-logging," in which software planted on a computer (perhaps via a virus) records everything a user types and passes it back to an identity thief. And don't forget "screen scrapers," which can snatch and send images of what's on-screen.
Spyware is another big problem. At its most innocuous, it's just an annoyance, spawning unwanted advertising, like pop-ups. In its more nefarious form, it can arrive as a "Trojan downloader," a program that lies dormant on a computer, only to perk up later to retrieve and install destructive code under a hacker's direction. "Once that gets into your system," says Cole, "you're in for a world of hurt."
In a University of Washington study released in February, researchers found that more than 1 in 20 "executable" (.exe) files they encountered during a massive Web crawl contained "piggybacked" spyware. And, on average, 1 in 62 websites launched what are called "drive-by download attacks," trying to force spyware on users who merely visited the sites.
Adding a disturbing wrinkle to all this shady activity is the fact that your own computer can be infected by hackers so that -- unknown to you -- it becomes one "zombie" among thousands in a robot network ("botnet") created to attack other computers. A recent federal case against one "botmaster," 20-year-old Jeanson James Ancheta, provides a glimpse into the scope of the threat.
Ancheta, of Downey, California, pleaded guilty in January to four felony counts. In doing so, he admitted taking control of hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected computers, using the zombie machines to send adware, and also selling spammers access to his botnet. In a just over a year, Ancheta earned $58,000 for providing these services.
"He's a little genius," says James Aquilina, the assistant U.S. attorney in Los Angeles who prosecuted Ancheta. "He just decided to do bad things instead of good."
While Ancheta wasn't an identity thief, Aquilina says his ability to create and command a corrupt computer network and his willingness to make it available on the black market underscore how much harm botnets could do if employed to steal identities.
"They are by far one of the most significant threats we face," he says.
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