While I obviously had no involvement in writing the trojan, I have written a great deal about its core victims — mainly dozens of small businesses here in the United States who saw their bank accounts drained of hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars after a Citadel infection.
A text string inside of the Citadel trojan. Source: AhnLab. When they invoke my name, usually they either want my attention or they want me to know I have their attention. Anyone that thinks they can continuously commit crimes in a digital world and not get caught are just….
Strange world. Years ago, I noticed on the news how the reporters would explain what the criminals did that got them caught. When reporting a bank robbery, they blatantly laid out the minute details of how the robbers were tracked down, etc. It struck me as training for how not to get caught for future criminals. The FBI just followed the breadcrumbs from there. I love the irony that the very feature necessary to make your malware more popular also provides the route for your personal demise.
With as much work as these guys have to do, why not just get an honest job that you can go home from? Why not just use the malware yourself to make a few million, then lay low for five years or so? You could work on making the malware better over that time and then hit again for twice as much.
You could also do smart things to avoid getting caught…like, stay off social media, use Tor and Tails, not get cocky and arrogant, etc. These idiots make it too easy for the FBI! Are they all dumb or what? But it can also be a NSA 0day at work. You sound a lot like American cops. We got the bad guys! Is there room in this fundamentalist view for an ethical hacker? Because you almost never paint hacking in a positive light. I would like to challenge you to find one hacker you think is doing some good in the hundreds that are plain thieves.
I said, What if it is not all well, and he said, You bloody well find another street. Security Researchers are essentially ethical hackers. There are plenty more people doing ethical hacking, but when you turn your exploits into financial gain, it ceases to be ethical.
Many, many peoples lives and businesses have been ruined by the activities of the men named in this story — who basically provided tech support to criminal hacking groups that were stealing, using and selling employee VPN credentials and certificates from countless companies. The bank and insurance should cover that. Officially, I could have gone after the customer who had placed the order, won a judgement against them, and then worked through the various methods open to me to collect — which would have cost multiple times the loss in time and effort.
What I did instead is toss the chargeback into an ever-thickening file, knowing that a certain percentage of our more-shady clientele would eventually forget just who it was they had defrauded and return to buy another ad — which I would consider selling them once their account was current. But the banks never ate a cent of that fraud. Finally, an enlightening comment. I was a wholesaler to retailers. The banks constantly cheated them out of reimbursements for card fraud. The Citadel Trojan, based on the Zeus source code, constructs a botnet consisting of a considerable number of infected computers.
The attacker can execute malicious code on an infected computer, including ransomware and scareware. How does it work? This Trojan was one of the earliest examples of malware-as-a-service available on dark-web forums. Citadel could also be used in targeted attacks exploiting Microsoft zero-day vulnerabilities to infect firms, as well as more traditional attacks. What is so special about Citadel malware? Vartanyan admitted his guilt as a plea bargain with US federal prosecutors who have agreed not to seek a prison sentence of more than ten years.
How to prevent Citadel from infecting my PC? The best way to prevent Citadel from infecting your PC is to avoid visiting unsafe websites, especially banking websites. Receive up-to-date content in our weekly bulletin. Sign Up. We are the State's one-stop-shop for cyber threat analysis, incident reporting, and information sharing and are committed to making New Jersey more resilient to cyber threats by spreading awareness and promoting the adoption of best practices.
View our Privacy Policy here. View our Site Index here. Reporting January Citadel was reportedly used in the initial compromise that led to the Target breach of
0コメント