Saturday, February 9, 2008

Banking Trojan can circumvent two-factor authentication

This is just fricking amazing. I am glad I don't 'bank' online

Targeting over 400 banks (including my own :( ! ) and having the ability to circumvent two-factor authentication are just two of the features that push Trojan.Silentbanker into the limelight. The scale and sophistication of this emerging banking Trojan is worrying, even for someone who sees banking Trojans on a daily basis.

This Trojan downloads a configuration file that contains the domain names of over 400 banks. Not only are the usual large American banks targeted but banks in many other countries are also targeted, including France, Spain, Ireland, the UK, Finland, Turkey—the list goes on.

The ability of this Trojan to perform man-in-the-middle attacks on valid transactions is what is most worrying. The Trojan can intercept transactions that require two-factor authentication. It can then silently change the user-entered destination bank account details to the attacker's account details instead. Of course the Trojan ensures that the user does not notice this change by presenting the user with the details they expect to see, while all the time sending the bank the attacker's details instead. Since the user doesn’t notice anything wrong with the transaction, they will enter the second authentication password, in effect handing over their money to the attackers. The Trojan intercepts all of this traffic before it is encrypted, so even if the transaction takes place over SSL the attack is still valid. Unfortunately, we were unable to reproduce exactly such a transaction in the lab. However, through analysis of the Trojan's code it can be seen that this feature is available to the attackers.


Read the whole article here: http://www.symantec.com/enterprise/security_response/weblog/2008/01/banking_in_silence.html

No comments: