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Trojan Built for Industrial Espionage
xPertCodert writes "Some of the largest Israeli companies are involved in the major industral espionage case, in which private investigators implanted specially crafted Trojan horses on the computers at unsuspecting companies in a bid to obtain priviledged financial and technical data. Given the current state of Windows security and advances in spyware, probably any company has become a very easy target for such spy attack from competitors"
maybe such incidents will start companies (and Microsoft in particular) to start taking spyware more seriously
By its verry nature, a trogen is a program that APPREARS to be good but has an evil payload. once again, the problem is gullible users and/or techs and/or admins. not windows per-se.
Not to mention their new anti-virus business (a subscription service which couples MS anti-virus with their anti-spyware). Am I the only one that sees the conflict of interests here?
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
I've dealt with Linux security enough to know security is work for any OS, especially when you are not just running servers for developers or apps. When you get into linux desktop users, security takes a lot of work and attention.
Mine is Good
Trojans are about social engineering. The only way to stop trojans is to prevent the people that might fall for them from ever being able to execute unauthorized programs.
"... [The authorities] found dozens of FTP servers in Israel and overseas, including the US. Haephrati is suspected of transferring stolen material from other computers to these FTP servers. The police realized the extent of the affair when they examined some of the files..."
If there was ever a time to be using encrypted volumes to store files, that was one of them.
The guy has fileservers full of self-incriminating evidence, but he can't even get his act together enough to strongly encrypt the thing? That's pretty damn sloppy.
If you did it right, all the cops would have was a bunch of bits, not stuff to put you away for a long time. This tells me the guy wasn't really trying hard enough. He needs to do it again, with feeling.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
that this type of attack has most probably been going on for years, without being detected.
More sophisticated worms and trojans will happen. Think of a virus that stealthily hides on computers, moving across the network till it finds itself on a machine in domain xyz.com. Once there it promulgates quietly, doing no damage, until one of its copies finds files of the variety xxxxx.xls. Then slowly searching those files, sending bits of it back to a server on the internet disguised as mail from the user of that machine.
It gets even scarier. Imagine that virus looking for your company's cvs server?
The only thing that I can think of to combat it is to ensure that all applications are checked before being run, and that they have certification by company security infrastructure. This might prevent joe bloggs from working at home and bringing the trojan to work with him.
It can be done if the program is executed by the user without verification of certification etc.
To totally lock down your network will become very difficult in the future. Commercial antivirus vendors will have to work very closely with OS groups to actually create a secure computing environment.... and user's will not like the efforts they have to go through to participate in that secure environment.
The current efforts by software vendors and groups will not even come close to stopping such spyware programs.
Well, that's how I see it anyway... who knows for sure.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
A lot of the supposed loss that results from espionage is mitigated by the fact that the stolen data simply goes from one inept corporate bureaucracy to another. As much as they'd like to, most lame, ossified organizations can't do much to improve their own position regardless of the strategic worth of stolen competitor's data.
It's just 'Spy vs. Spy'; an endless expensive game that changes very little in the real world.
And regarding the use of social engineering to break into secure systems and procure passwords, it too has exagerated importance. The old fashioned tried-and-true methods of blackmail, bribery, kidnapping, and extortion work as well if not better in modern corporate and military environments as they have for hundreds of years. The stricter the corporate punishment for transgressions, the more inflexible the rules, the harder the no-tolerance policy... the cheaper and easier it is to use blackmail and bribery on the target employees. This is why the Americans can't destroy 'the base' (whose Arabic name triggers the NSA internet evesdropping software). They can't be blackmailed, bribed, or persuaded with. Hell, they can't even be found.
You want a secure corporate environment? Trust your people, pay your people reasonably, don't assume that you can judge their moral character by the molecular structure of their urine. In other words, don't act like a stupid paranoid American.