Freaky Sneaks Around The Globe

Trojan horse started running in July and continues now, security firm says

A Trojan horse planted by criminals was used to steal more than $1 million from the accounts of British customers of the same online bank since last month, according to an international digital security company, and the cyber attack is still underway.

Security firm M86 declined to name the bank, but said in a statement that about 3,000 customers of “one of the biggest financial institutions have fallen victim to a sophisticated attack by cybercriminals using Web-based malware to rob money via the bank’s online banking system.”

Since July 5, 675,000 pounds, or a little more than $1 million, has been taken by the criminals, whose “command and control center” is believed to be in Eastern Europe, M86 said.

The Trojan horse, called Zeus v3, “steals the customer’s online banking ID and hijacks their online banking sessions,” the firm said. “It then checks the account balance and, if the account balance is bigger than GBP 800 value (about $1,200), it issues a money transfer transaction.”

The Trojan horse is being placed in website advertisements and users who click on those ads may unwittingly be downloading the poisonous payload to their computers. Users who do not have their Web browsers updated to the most recent versions may be the most vulnerable.

Web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari continue to get stronger in terms of providing much better protection against malware, or malicious software, like the protection, but it is up to users to make sure they have the most recent versions installed.

The Trojan horse itself kicks in when the user connects to the bank’s website; the software then starts recording account details, such as passwords, as a user enters them.

Zeus v3 “managed to avoid detection by traditional anti-virus software,” M86 said.

The scheme, the firm said in a white paper, “indicates a new level of technical sophistication and signals the continuation of a cybercrime trend that has evolved” in the past few years.

The company’s findings jibe with those of McAfee Security, which said this week that the production of malicious software code worldwide reached a new high in the first six months of 2010.

A spokeswoman for Financial Fraud Action UK, which coordinates the British banking industry’s efforts against fraud, told the Daily Mail that “The idea that criminals are targeting people by using malicious software or Trojans is nothing new. Bank systems are hard to attack so they’re having to go through the easier link in the chain, which is the customers.

“They’re hoping customers aren’t taking security precautions,” she said. “We’ve been seeing this for the last few years and we’re constantly urging people to protect their computers to try to mitigate the risk of becoming a victim.”

thanks to msnbc

IBM has unveiled a new chip technology, called CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics chip technology, which enables a 10X improvement in integration density and produces smaller, faster and more power-efficient chips than is possible with conventional technologies.

IBM scientists today unveiled a new chip technology that integrates electrical and optical devices on the same piece of silicon, enabling computer chips to communicate using pulses of light (instead of electrical signals), resulting in smaller, faster and more power-efficient chips than is possible with conventional technologies.

The new technology, called CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics, is the result of a decade of development at IBM’s global Research laboratories. The patented technology will change and improve the way computer chips communicate – by integrating optical devices and functions directly onto a silicon chip, enabling over 10X improvement in integration density than is feasible with current manufacturing techniques.

IBM anticipates that Silicon Nanophotonics will dramatically increase the speed and performance between chips, and further the company’s ambitious Exascale computing program, which is aimed at developing a supercomputer that can perform one million trillion calculations—or an Exaflop—in a single second. An Exascale supercomputer will be approximately one thousand times faster than the fastest machine today.

“The development of the Silicon Nanophotonics technology brings the vision of on-chip optical interconnections much closer to reality,” said Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president, Science and Technology, IBM Research. “With optical communications embedded into the processor chips, the prospect of building power-efficient computer systems with performance at the Exaflop level is one step closer to reality.”

In addition to combining electrical and optical devices on a single chip, the new IBM technology can be produced on the front-end of a standard CMOS manufacturing line and requires no new or special tooling. With this approach, silicon transistors can share the same silicon layer with silicon nanophotonics devices. To make this approach possible, IBM researchers have developed a suite of integrated ultra-compact active and passive silicon nanophotonics devices that are all scaled down to the diffraction limit – the smallest size that dielectric optics can afford.

“Our CMOS Integrated Nanophotonics breakthrough promises unprecedented increases in silicon chip function and performance via ubiquitous low-power optical communications between racks, modules, chips or even within a single chip itself,” said Dr. Yurii A. Vlasov, Manager of the Silicon Nanophotonics Department at IBM Research. “The next step in this advancement is to establishing manufacturability of this process in a commercial foundry using IBM deeply scaled CMOS processes.”

By adding just a few more processing modules to a standard CMOS fabrication flow, the technology enables a variety of silicon nanophotonics components, such as: modulators, germanium photodetectors and ultra-compact wavelength-division multiplexers to be integrated with high-performance analog and digital CMOS circuitry. As a result, single-chip optical communications transceivers can now be manufactured in a standard CMOS foundry, rather than assembled from multiple parts made with expensive compound semiconductor technology.

The density of optical and electrical integration demonstrated by IBM’s new technology is unprecedented – a single transceiver channel with all accompanying optical and electrical circuitry occupies only 0.5mm2 – 10 times smaller than previously announced by others. The technology is amenable for building single-chip transceivers with area as small as 4x4mm2 that can receive and transmit over Terabits per second that is over a trillion bits per second.

More information: The details and results of this research effort will be reported in a presentation delivered by Dr. Yurii Vlasov at the major international semiconductor industry conference SEMICON held in Tokyo on the December 1, 2010. The talk is entitled “CMOS Integrated Silicon Nanophotonics: Enabling Technology for Exascale Computational Systems” co-authored by William Green, Solomon Assefa, Alexander Rylyakov, Clint Schow, Folkert Horst, and Yurii Vlasov of IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. and IBM Zurich Research Lab in Rueschlikon, Switzerland.

Source: IBM