Monday, October 27, 2008

Banks, Malware, and More Failing Tokens

The Kaspersky folks have an interesting report on malware that targets the banking and financial markets that supports and echoes many of the things posted here over the last several months. For one, the banking industry is receiving targeted malware, which makes it more difficult for "signature" based anti-malware solutions to find the malware. For two, issues with second-factor authentication tokens don't solve the malware-in-the-browser problem.
"In order for a cyber criminal to be able to perform transactions when dynamic passwords are in place using phishing, s/he has to use a Man-in-the-Middle attack.... Setting up a MitM attack is inherently more difficult than setting up a standard phishing site; however, there are now MitM kits available, so cyber criminals can create attacks on popular banks with a minimum of effort."