Banking security under scrutiny

2013-10-10

Helen Martin

Virus Bulletin, UK

Editor: Helen Martin

Abstract

UK banks' cyber defences put to the test in large-scale simulated attack.

In June this year the Director of Financial Stability at the Bank of England warned that cyber attacks are now a greater risk to the banking system than the poor state of the global economy, and shortly afterwards the UK government announced plans to rate UK banks on their resilience to cyber attacks. Next month, ‘Operation Waking Shark 2’ will do just that by testing the defences of the UK’s high street banks, stock market and payment providers in a large-scale simulated cyber attack.

The exercise will be monitored by the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority and the results will be used to identify areas of weakness – those found to have weaker defences are expected to face demands to invest more in their online security. A similar operation was run two years ago on a smaller scale – this year’s exercise is expected to involve several thousand participants.

Latest articles:

Nexus Android banking botnet – compromising C&C panels and dissecting mobile AppInjects

Aditya Sood & Rohit Bansal provide details of a security vulnerability in the Nexus Android botnet C&C panel that was exploited to compromise the C&C panel in order to gather threat intelligence, and present a model of mobile AppInjects.

Cryptojacking on the fly: TeamTNT using NVIDIA drivers to mine cryptocurrency

TeamTNT is known for attacking insecure and vulnerable Kubernetes deployments in order to infiltrate organizations’ dedicated environments and transform them into attack launchpads. In this article Aditya Sood presents a new module introduced by…

Collector-stealer: a Russian origin credential and information extractor

Collector-stealer, a piece of malware of Russian origin, is heavily used on the Internet to exfiltrate sensitive data from end-user systems and store it in its C&C panels. In this article, researchers Aditya K Sood and Rohit Chaturvedi present a 360…

Fighting Fire with Fire

In 1989, Joe Wells encountered his first virus: Jerusalem. He disassembled the virus, and from that moment onward, was intrigued by the properties of these small pieces of self-replicating code. Joe Wells was an expert on computer viruses, was partly…

Run your malicious VBA macros anywhere!

Kurt Natvig wanted to understand whether it’s possible to recompile VBA macros to another language, which could then easily be ‘run’ on any gateway, thus revealing a sample’s true nature in a safe manner. In this article he explains how he recompiled…

Bulletin Archive