On April 4, 2013, TalaTek attended the MACHA (Mid-Atlantic Clearing House Association) training on Account Takeover and Cyber Crime.
The full-day program was designed to assist financial institutions in mitigating their risks from account takeovers.
With increasing frequency, financial institutions are facing the challenges of their customer’s authentication credentials being compromised, as well as attempts to initiate fraudulent payment transactions.
Current threats include cyber-criminals, nation-state and non-state actors, an increasing number of black-market hacking tools, commercial intrusion kits, trans-national organized crime, and old-fashioned corruption.
One problem is that hacked personal computers are used for a variety of malicious activities, including bot-nets, gaining credentials for Web sites, financial credential theft, hostage attacks, reputation hijacking, stealing virtual goods, e-mail attacks, and to set up a malicious Web server.
Phishing attacks often appear like legitimate e-mails from Facebook, LinkedIn, FedEx, NACHA, IRS, and other credible sources. However, these attacks often include viruses or browser hacks that have a low initial virus detection rate. It can be several months before the detection rate improves. For example, the initial detection rate for some phishing attacks can be as low as three out of 42 virus scanning products.
Cyber-criminals are now using the technique which has been dubbed “Water Hole.” In this technique, they plant “exploits” on legitimate Web sites and attack the Web site’s targets instead of attacking the target directly. One such exploit sat on the L.A. Times Web site for six weeks.
The typical process of account takeover consists of:
- Password-stealing Trojan sent as e-mail attachment to victims
- Victim’s credentials are sent to criminals
- Criminal logs into victim’s bank account
- Criminal sends les-than-$10,000 payments to money mules in the USA
- Mules withdraw cash and forward to criminals overseas
TalaTek’s trained and certified information assurance consultants are ready to help your organization proactively protect against the risks of account takeover and to thwart cyber-criminals.
