BitDefender researcher says this is exactly what he was expecting: more and more companies that keep large amounts of personal/confidential/private data being attacked.
"We believe that fraudsters are corroborating all these information (corporate hacks or leaks), malicious mobile and social network apps into creating profiles of people everywhere in the world, with the purpose of creating better social engineered attacks, and everybody is a possible victim." says Catalin Cosoi from the Online Threats Lab."
And also:
"Monitoring a political personality's email (especially a personal one) can lead to a really nice profit for an attacker, no matter if he is just a hacker or a bigger organization is involved. Besides personal information, monitoring the private conversations can lead to blackmail and extortion and/or manipulation of the individual into performing different actions."
Last month, a smaller antivirus producer was also detected by MS Antispyware as a Chinese nasty. Last year, the same producer reported a similar issue.
Meanwhile, Microsoft protects itself by keeping this Beta1 title on this "product"; but the wide spreading of this (the software has been downloaded about 25 million times, according to Microsoft) could be very well a marketing tactics... I just wonder: are these the opening shots in Microsoft's attempt to muscle competitors out of the lucrative software security market?
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BitDefender researcher says this is exactly what he was expecting: more and more companies that keep large amounts of personal/confidential/private data being attacked.
"We believe that fraudsters are corroborating all these information (corporate hacks or leaks), malicious mobile and social network apps into creating profiles of people everywhere in the world, with the purpose of creating better social engineered attacks, and everybody is a possible victim." says Catalin Cosoi from the Online Threats Lab."
And also: "Monitoring a political personality's email (especially a personal one) can lead to a really nice profit for an attacker, no matter if he is just a hacker or a bigger organization is involved. Besides personal information, monitoring the private conversations can lead to blackmail and extortion and/or manipulation of the individual into performing different actions."
Last month, a smaller antivirus producer was also detected by MS Antispyware as a Chinese nasty. Last year, the same producer reported a similar issue. Meanwhile, Microsoft protects itself by keeping this Beta1 title on this "product"; but the wide spreading of this (the software has been downloaded about 25 million times, according to Microsoft) could be very well a marketing tactics... I just wonder: are these the opening shots in Microsoft's attempt to muscle competitors out of the lucrative software security market?