Attackers Once Again Strike Mac OS X during June 2011: Kaspersky

Kaspersky Lab in its latest report states that two months back users of Apple Mac OS X had been hit with a wave of attacks that continued through June 2011.

Reveals the company, Internet crooks disseminated Backdoor.OSX.Olyx.a a backdoor Trojan created especially for giving them complete hold over the infected PCs. The badware facilitated the miscreants towards utilizing Apple machines from contaminated PCs for pulling down other malware, for issuing instructions to execute specific activities, and for launching programs.

Also during June 2011, some international crook gangs that were spreading rogue anti-virus software and earning money were forced to close down their network operations.

An initial computation suggests that the destruction to USA because of the said networks valued some $74m. Legal officials representing nations like Netherlands, France, Germany, Romania, UK, Sweden, Canada, Latvia, Lithuania, Cyprus and Ukraine joined together to shutdown the networks. About 600 people reportedly, were taken into legal custody from countries in South Asia.

Moreover, during June 2011, Pavel Vrublevsky from Russia who owned the country's prominent payment processing outfit ChronoPay was detained over accusation that he orchestrated a distributed denial-of-service assault against a rival firm. One more vital development that's worth stating about fighting cyber-crime through legislation is that the Japanese parliament 'Diet,' during June 2011, passed several amendments to already prevailing acts, initiating prison sentences for those who would design and disseminate malicious software.

Furthermore as per the report, Russian fraudsters attempted at earning cash in exchange of literally nothing during June 2011, playing with the BitCoin system of virtual money. They employed a fresh strain of malware to introduce an authentic BitCoin file to compromised PCs so they could spawn the online currency within personal financial accounts.

Additionally, during June 2011, experts blocked around 200m assaults from networks, prevented 68m infections distributed through the Web, and identified 200m malware items. Further, there were numerous fresh entrants into the list of 20 most widespread malicious programs during June 2011. The dominant malware once again was one which spread through drive-by downloads, including exploits, script downloaders and redirectors that occupied 14 places among the total 20.

Related article: Attackers Use Another ‘Word Flaw’ To Plant Trojan

» SPAMfighter News - 7/16/2011