RSA Anti-Fraud Command Centre detects new developments in Botnet and Fast-Flux phishing

RSA Anti-Fraud Command Centre detects new developments in Botnet and Fast-Flux phishing

Category

Anti Spam

RSA, The Security Division of EMC, today released highlights from its online fraud report for February 2008.

In line with its predictions for 2008, in February the RSA Anti-Fraud Command Centre (AFCC) has continued to see a growing number of phishing groups or networks that utilise Botnets of proxies and Fast-Flux techniques. Over the past four months the RSA AFCC has identified five new phishing networks that rely on hijacked proxies, some of which were Fast-Flux networks. These new networks or phishing groups attack financial institutions worldwide. RSA expects this trend to continue and the number of Fast-Flux attacks to increase during 2008.

In addition, RSA has identified increased use in January and February of obfuscated phishing kits – containing mostly encoded PHP scripts – which require greater effort from security experts to be decoded.

During the past few months, the AFCC has also detected an increasing number of attacks that use multiple variations of the same spammed URL. This technique is not new and is widely used in order to avoid spam filters and create “personalised” phishing messages. However, RSA is now seeing an increased use of a specific URL ‘multiplication’ format that changes a single digit or serial number within the URL. This is most likely an effort to avoid anti-spam filters that can identify patterns of phishing URLs. The slight change in the URL makes in unfamiliar to these filters and it takes time until anti-spam systems learn the new format.

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About RSA

RSA, The Security Division of EMC, is the premier provider of security solutions for business acceleration, helping the world's leading organisations succeed by solving their most complex and sensitive security challenges. RSA's information-centric approach to security guards the integrity and confidentiality of information throughout its lifecycle - no matter where it moves, who accesses it or how it is used.

RSA offers industry-leading solutions in identity assurance & access control, encryption & key management, compliance & security information management and fraud protection. These solutions bring trust to millions of user identities, the transactions that they perform, and the data that is generated. For more information, please visit www.RSA.com and www.EMC.com.

Media Contact

Geoff Noble

Banking and Finance Specialist

RSA, The Security Division of EMC

gnoble@rsa.com

+61 2 9463 8400

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