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| A series of Trojan horses have attempted to fool
Brazilian surfers into entering their bank login details. |
Federal police in Brazil have announced that they have arrested
53 people for stealing money from internet bank accounts with a
series of phishing Trojan horses. Allegedly, approximately $30
million is said to have been stolen from online banking
customers.
The police swoop, which involved 160 policemen, took place
across four states in the north of Brazil, with most of those
apprehended said to be under the age of 25. According to
investigators 18 of the suspects had been imprisoned for similar
offences in the past.
Banks targeted by the Trojan horses included Banco do Brasil,
Bradesco, Caixa Economica Federal, HSBC, Itau, and Unibanco.
"Hackers and virus writers in Brazil seized upon the opportunity
to make significant amounts of money by writing these Trojan
horses," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for
Sophos. "The Trojans would lurk in the background, waiting for
innocent users to enter their bank login details and then secretly
pass them back to the hackers. The Brazilian authorities should be
congratulated for taking swift action against this activity - fifty
arrests give some idea of the huge scale of this kind of organised
internet crime."
Virus experts at Sophos warned Brazilian computer
users earlier this year of the increasing trend of Trojan
horses being written specifically targeting customers of Brazil's
online bank websites.
Even this week, Sophos has added detection for several new
Brazilian Trojans. Once a computer is infected with one of the
Trojans internet activity is monitored, and if it is determined
that the computer user is visiting one of a number of Brazilian
banking websites a fake login page is displayed and the
confidential data emailed back to the hacker's email address.
"All computer users should be running an up-to-date anti-virus
as well as protecting their PC with a firewall. This, combined with
the safe computing practice of exercising caution over what you
choose to run on your computer, can dramatically reduce the risks
of these kind of attacks," continued Cluley.
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.