Epsilon Poised with Cloud-Computing-Related Data Breaches in Q2-2011: Trend Micro

According to a recent report, "2Q 2011 Threat Roundup", published by Trend Micro Inc., a global cloud security leader, the most dangerous threats to the computer world has been discussed. Cloud-computing-related data breaches as notably, the Epsilon breach was the most remarkable breach making headlines in April 2011, according to the report.

The e-mail system of Epsilon was hacked by cyber crooks providing them with an access over personal details of clients. The consequence of this incident exposed about 50 client's security and they were automatically at a target to major risk of data theft and spear-phishing attacks. As a result, Epsilon was triggered to issue a warning in the official site and provide a supporting tool to facilitate clients to determine if their details were among the so-called exposed or not.

Cyber crooks were however enthralled to use Epsilon's solution for their own advantage, especially as they found it profitable for exploiting over 2000 global clients.

Engineers at TrendLabsSM remained vigilant once the tool was released towards the presence of a web page spoofing that permits downloading of the Epsilon Secure Connect Tool. The forged tool detected as TROJ_MSPOSER.ASM provided cyber crooks the accessibility to steal personally identifiable information (PII) from compromised systems through a backdoor application, namely BKDR_MSPOSER.KAX.

Also, according to the report, for exploit attacks, Microsoft was acclaimed the leading vendor target with an aggregate of 96 attacks. Google and Adobe followed with 65 and 62 attacks, respectively. However, significant enough, Apple that hit the list of top rankings in Q1-2011 was not in the Top 10 rank this time (Q2-2011).

Apart from these scams, social networking scams are also becoming more sophisticated and cyber crooks are continuously taking advantage of disseminating malicious software, particularly through Facebook. Some of the scams are even spread in the form of malicious links through Facebook tools or as "copy-and-paste" scripts leading to data theft.

According to Raimund Genes, CTO at Trend Micro, is quite apprehensive of the legacy unseen future of malware by cyber crooks till the end of 2011, which is spreading like a wild fire, reports sacbee on August 2, 2011.

» SPAMfighter News - 8/15/2011