[IP] Web Virus May Be Stealing Financial Data
Web Virus May Be Stealing Financial Data
By ANICK JESDANUN
NEW YORK (AP) - A mysterious Internet virus being spread Friday by
hundreds and possibly thousands of infected Web sites may be aimed at
stealing credit card and other valuable information, security experts
warned.
The infection appears to take advantage of three separate flaws with
Microsoft Corp. products. Microsoft said software updates to fix two of
them had been released in April, but the third flaw was newly
discovered and had no patch to fix it yet.
Experts said the infection, detected by Microsoft on Thursday, was
unusually broad but wasn't substantially interfering with Internet
traffic.
Security experts at Microsoft and elsewhere worked Friday to pin down
how the infection spreads across Web sites. It appears to target at
least one recent version of Microsoft software for operating Web sites
- called Internet Information Server.
The infection makes subtle changes to the Web site so visitors get a
piece of code that's designed to retrieve from a Russian Web site
software that records a person's keystrokes and can send data back,
experts say. Such software ``Trojan horses'' are routinely used to fish
for credit card numbers, bank accounts, passwords and the like.
Now that the code is out, other hackers are likely to adapt it to
distribute software for spamming and for launching broad Internet
attacks against popular Web sites, said Alfred Huger, senior director
of engineering at security company Symantec Corp.
``Users should be aware that any Web site, even those that may be
trusted by the user, may be affected by this activity and thus contain
potentially malicious code,'' the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness
Team warned in an Internet alert.
Stephen Toulouse, a security program manager at Microsoft, recommended
that computer owners obtain the latest security updates for Microsoft
products and their anti-virus and firewall programs.
Because one flaw has yet to be fixed, he said, users should also turn
up security settings on Microsoft's Internet Explorer browsers to the
highest levels.
Security experts noted that users can avoid the exploit by using
alternative browsers such as Mozilla and Opera. Users could also turn
off the ``Javascript'' feature on their Microsoft browsers, though
doing so cripple functions on some sites.
The infection does not affect Macintosh versions of Internet Explorer.
On the Net:
Microsoft bulletin:
http://www.microsoft.com/security/incident/download-ject.mspx
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story/
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