Phishing Threats: Spear Phishing / PoisonIvy backdoor trojan targeting Chemical and Defense Companies

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Spear Phishing / PoisonIvy backdoor trojan targeting Chemical and Defense Companies

http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/nitro-hackers-target-chemical-and-defense-companies-says-symantec/2011-11-02

Symantec Report of October 31, 2011 reports about a wave of spear phishing attacks targeting chemical and defense industry segments in US and Europe, where already 20 companies have been victimized.

The attacks are engineered through spear phishing emails with attachments containing the self-extracting PoisonIvy trojan executable.

PoisonIvy is a backdoor trojan, developed by a Chinese hacker. It sets up http communication channel over port 80 with the command and control (C&C) botnet server. The bot harvests IP addresses and cached passwords and targets intellectual property and other sensitive data.

Read more on the 'Nitro Attacks' report by Symantec:
http://www.symantec.com/content/en/us/enterprise/media/security_response/whitepapers/the_nitro_attacks.pdf

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Phishing Threats

Computer users receive emails from their bankers or employers, or from utility companies or other institutions or organizations they deal with or even from friends on facebook or twitter, asking for updating their personal information by clicking on links provided in the mail. They take it for granted that these are genuine mails and in good faith click on the links. The phishers who are organized criminals redirect the users to malicious websites and harvest their personal information. The users ultimately become victims to identity theft, financial frauds and even more serious crimes leading to blackmail, murder, and so on.

Phishing attacks engineered by criminals through the medium of phishing emails ultimately lead to loss of consumer confidence in online transactions that include financial transactions and social interactions through Facebook and other social networking sites.

This is an attempt to survey the phishing threat landscape, to identify the criminal groups and their modus operandi and to understand the impact of phishing on online users.