Christmas Card Steals Confidential Information. Information Security Experts Fear Cyber Espionage

By Author: Contact Press
Total Articles: 7
Comment this article

Recently, information security professionals identified data breach by cybercriminals. The offenders reportedly sent e-mails to government employees and contracted professionals. The e-mail address was spoofed to make it appear as sent from whitehouse.gov domain. The e-mail message thanked the staff for their contribution and conveyed greetings for the holidays. The message also contained a greeting card link. While the staff may have overjoyed on receiving e-mail from white house, they were actually victims of a spear phishing attack, wherein sensitive information was stolen from their computers.

Experts have identified that a variant of Zeus Trojan was used to install malware in computer systems. When unwary recipients clicked on the greeting card link, they were prompted to open a .zip file. As users opened the .Zip file, their systems were infected by the Trojan. The Trojan stole passwords and documents such as PDF files, word and excel documents to upload them to a remote server. The server ...
... was allegedly based in Belarus. IT Security experts have expressed the possibility of cyber-espionage as the victims included an Intelligence analyst of Massachusetts State Police, an employee of National Science Foundation's (NSF) Office of Cyber Infrastructure and an employee of Financial Action Task force. The compromised data includes cell-phone intercepts, document on protection national security information and grant applications to NSF for new technologies.

Ironically, the attack comes at a time, when governments across the world are dealing with chaos created by WikiLeaks disclosure. The attack highlights the imminent threat to information security