A New York school district had US$3.8M pilfered by cyber-criminals, who may have used a common banking trojan to gain valid login credentials to the district\u2019s accounts.\u00a0 The very same trojan making the rounds on social networks like Facebook.\u00a0 The district has recovered most of the money, but is still out nearly US$500K. <\/p>\n
An Information Week article<\/a> last week highlighted some of the facts around the breach involving the Duanesburg Central School District in New York state.\u00a0 The prevailing theory is that the Zeus banking trojan is to blame.\u00a0 Unfortunately, while AV has gotten better at detecting the trojan<\/a> and the accompanying botnet (zbot), organizations can\u2019t control the transmission vectors, which are increasingly social networking and\/or webmail applications.\u00a0 Given the high degree of user trust and huge user populations, malware developers have been targeting social networks aggressively (webmail is a well-established transmission vector).\u00a0 Some of the threats come in the form of social network-specific threats (e.g., koobface, fbaction), but many times they\u2019re re-using existing or older threats delivered in a new, hybrid way \u2013 exploiting the trust associated with social networks \u2013 which has given threats like Zeus a huge boost.\u00a0 If you can\u2019t control the transmission vector, it\u2019s much harder to manage the threat\u2026especially when users click first, and think later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A New York school district had US$3.8M pilfered by cyber-criminals, who may have used a common banking trojan to gain valid login credentials to the district\u2019s accounts.\u00a0 The very same trojan making …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[25,51],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-899","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-social-networking","tag-threats"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=899"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":934,"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/899\/revisions\/934"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=899"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=899"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=899"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/origin-researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=899"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}