In China these days, e-commerce has become an important part of daily life, especially among young people. According to a report from CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center), the number of Chinese e-commerce users reached 242 million at the end of the December 2012. This is nearly half of all Chinese internet users.

Because of this, many Chinese cyber-criminals changed their business from stealing QQ numbers or virtual assets in online games to stealing money during the online trading. In October, People-s Daily, the official newspaper of the Communist Party of China, reported that a group of cybercriminals were arrested in connection with a Trojan targeting the e-commerce users. The Trojan, detected by Kaspersky Lab as trojan-Banker.Win32.Bancyn.a, was named -Floating Cloud-, and was used to steal several millions of dollars from e-commerce users.

The name -Floating Cloud-, -浮云- in Chinese, comes from a very popular saying among Chinese internet users -神马都是浮云-. The direct translation is -God horses are always floating clouds-, which means everything flows away in haste like floating clouds. But here, the floating cloud is not a God horse but a Trojan horse. And the -Floating Cloud- was written in EAZY programming language in which programs can be written totally in Chinese.

To distribute the Trojan, cyber-criminals often masquerade as sellers. When the customer/target asks for information about the merchandise, they send a zip archive with the names like -detail information- which purports to contain a few pictures depicting the merchandise. But among these pictures, there is an executable file with the icon of image files. If the customer wants to take a look at this -picture- file and double clicks it, the Trojan will run.

In information security, talk about botnets equals talk about malicious actions that materialize through criminal action. In essence, we think there is always a hostile attitude on the part of those who administer them. Please correct me colleagues, refute this if I'm wrong, but I think conceptually you agree with me.

BoteAR (developed in Argentina) adopts the concept of "social networks" although it seems, as yet, not fully materialized. It offers a conventional and manageable botnet via HTTP but uses the model of crimeware-as-a-service. Moreover, the author seems to adopt (maybe unknowingly) the business model of affiliate systems originating in Eastern Europe which are used to spread malware i.e. infect and get revenue for each node you infect.

So far nothing unusual, unfortunately we witness this kind of tactic every day. The striking thing about BoteAR though is that it tries to shield itself under a wrapper of security in an attempt to "fraternize" with its community.

    Carolina Dieckmann, a famous Brazilian actress, recently became the victim of cyber attacks that allowed cybercriminals to steal personal property - nude pictures of her- from her computer. Many pictures or maybe all of them got leaked to the Internet. This incident has served as a good incentive for the Brazilian government to have new cybercrime laws in the country (the current law to fight cybercrime in Brazil was approved back in the 40’s of XX century). As a result of this incident, a new cybercrime law that carries a punishment of up to 2 years in prison for such crimes has finally been proposed for consideration. This is a good and right move! A press article in Portuguese can be

On 20 March, Russian law enforcement agencies announced the arrest of a cybercriminal gang involved in stealing money using the Carberp Trojan. This is very good news, but unfortunately does not mark the end of the Carberp story.

Evidently, those arrested were just one of the criminal gangs using the Trojan. At the same time, those who actually developed Carberp are still at large, openly selling the Trojan on cybercriminal forums.

Here is a recent offer for the ‘multifunctional bankbot’, which appeared on 21 March:

In this webcast, Eugene Kaspersky, CEO and co-founder of Kaspersky Lab, shares his extensive knowledge of the driving forces that power the modern cyber-criminal ecosystem and discuss the way that cybercrime operates. He covers the latest developments in the security technologies and describes how he sees the security industry developing in the nearest future. Additionally, Eugene pays particular attention to showing how modern cloud security solutions not only protect users and businesses, but can seriously impede the cyber-criminals' black economy, thereby significantly reducing cyber-crime.

While Eugene’s busy taking bets (wonder how much he’s going to make?), I’ve been having a think about the Winlock case.

Russian law enforcement is estimating that the bad guys could have raked in as much as $1 billion. While it’s difficult to be certain about the exact amounts involved (obviously they spread their money across a lot of different accounts to avoid attracting attention), a little bit of simple math makes me think this figure isn’t as crazy as it might sound.

Our statistical analysis tells us there could be around a million people who’ve been infected. 10 cybercriminals, each getting a cut of a ransom between $10 and $30 - even though they were paying out $3 per infection to the people willing to spread this malware, the numbers add up pretty quickly.

Interesting news on Trojan SMS Blockers (Winlock etc). These programs block Windows and demand a ransom in the form of a text message which is sent to short number for a fee. It's a very popular type of racket at the moment, both in Russia and a few other countries.

The whole affair has now reached the General Prosecutor’s office of Russia – the criminals have been identified and detained (or so it seems) and will be prosecuted in Moscow soon.

Altogether the criminals have earned an estimated 790,000 roubles, or $25K. Moreover, they have caused other damages by blocking or crashing a yet to be determined number of personal and company PCs. Very often people have needed to re-install the OS and all software and then restore data from backups - even after paying the ransom.

But I wanted to focus on the outcome – or the possible outcome of this incident, not on the investigation, arrests and so forth.

Malware writers today always try to conceal their identities, right? Wrong – even some of today’s profit driven cyber criminals reveal their identities. We are a bit surprised, but here is the story of how a blackhat has revealed his identity and is trying to ‘get compensation’ from Kaspersky for conducting research.

Recently we have been looking into a new service for malware writers: [avtracker dot info]. This is an online service designed to track AV vendors. The home page of [avtracker dot info] describes the service which includes protection for malicious programs against analysis by malware researchers and also calls for a DDoS attacks against security companies:

Moreover, some of our fellow researchers shared a network request with us that was used to report back to [avtracker dot info]. This request was used in a special spy program which was distributed to various antivirus labs by the owner of [avtracker dot info]. If executed, this spyware would contact the owner and describe the environment of the infected machine. We played around with this request, and substituted various random strings instead of the user name and system parameters.

The WHOIS listing was of no use – [avtracker dot info] was registered anonymously. This was no surprise – cyber criminals usually do register domains anonymously to hinder identification.

So far, nothing out of the ordinary – a normal day in the life of an antivirus company. And then…surprise – the owner of the malware writers’ service contacted us and revealed his identity. Moreover, he even demanded a ransom of 2000 euro to compensate his purported losses when we attempt to ‘break’ his new toy.

At the time of writing, we have received the spy program, which had the following message in its code pointing to the same person who contacted us:

Naturally, we have gathered all relevant data and forwarded it to our lawyer who will now take the next steps. If all cyber criminals were as cooperative as this one, life would be much easier for AV companies.

There seems to be quite a loud response to what I thought was a rather simple idea. In this post, I am going to go over the main points – somewhere when I have more time I’ll share my ideas in detail so people could see exactly what I am proposing.

1. Common users are NOT anonymous for police and governments. Today the authorities can find any person they are after easily. There is a wrong perception about Internet-anonymity – very few people realize that it does not exist for ordinary users. But the worst part of the story is that the ones who are truly anonymous are professional cyber criminals, because they know what to do to hide their real identities in the Internet. That is why we have millions of malicious programs and successful network attacks every years, and we don’t know who’s behind of them.
2. When I say "no anonymity" I mean only "no anonymity for security control". I don't care about the way people behave on blogs, forums, social networks and pirate torrent portals. You may use nicks or real names as you want (as we do today). The only "no more anonymity" improvement - you MUST present your ID to your Internet provider when you are connecting online. It is only the provider who needs to know your real identity.
3. Another way to go is dedicated anonymous networks and dedicated business/gov networks - why not? But all LEGAL businesses/services will want to use secure networks, and unsecure networks will be probably limited to casual communication.
4. When is it going to happen? Never… or in one-two generations. After some really serious IT- incidents, which will have a serious impact on national and\or global economies. I am now talking not only about cybercrime, but also about cyberterrorist attacks. We already see the first signs of emerging cyberterrorism – and global anonymity is a really favorable factor for these people.

   Imagine that everyone flying in your plane is anonymous, so you don’t know who they are and what they’re up to – are you really going to approve of this? And Internet is as critical and as vulnerable as the air transportation network. So why do we have different security standards for these two global networks?

5. But we are already on the way – some European countries have introduced digital IDs, which they use for secure online banking and in some cases for online voting. National and municipal elections via the Internet are not a matter of science fiction – they are already here, and ID authentication is a vital part of such election systems.

   Another prototype of e-passports is the two-factor authentication we now use to access corporate networks. The only thing that is missing today is a common standard.

Anyway, I am happy to see that my ideas have raised so much discussion; I think that open public discourse and idea-sharing is the only way to make Internet a safer and a better place.

The BBC’s Click program has been getting quite a bit of publicity after it “acquired” a botnet. It used the botnet to send spam (to specially created addresses) and bring down a website (with the consent of the site’s owners). This was all done in the name of consumer education.

Normally, the BBC does a great job telling people about the potential dangers of computing. But this time they’ve gone about it the wrong way. The Computer Misuse Act clearly states that a person is guilty of an offence if “he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer”.

I’m not a lawyer, and smart lawyers often manage to find loopholes in the law. But I do work for a security company, and it’s my view that the Click guys certainly broke the spirit, if not the letter, of the law.

Accessing other people’s computers is wrong. Accessing other people’s computers to create TV content, even with the best of intentions, is very wrong indeed.