Tag Archives: Facebook

Ramnit Worm Goes Social!

Much has been written about the Ramnit worm and its transformation into a financial malware. And now, Seculert’s research lab has discovered that Ramnit recently started targeting Facebook accounts with considerable success, stealing over 45,000 Facebook login credentials worldwide, mostly from people in the UK and France.

Discovered in April 2010, the Microsoft Malware Protection Center (MMPC) described Ramnit as “a multi-component malware family which infects Windows executable as well as HTML files”, “stealing sensitive information such as stored FTP credentials and browser cookies”. In July 2011 a Symantec report [PDF] estimated that Ramnit worm variants accounted for 17.3 percent of all new malicious software infections.

In August 2011, Trusteer reported that Ramnit went ‘financial’. Following the leakage of the ZeuS source-code in May, it has been suggested that the hackers behind Ramnit merged several financial-fraud spreading capabilities to create a “Hybrid creature” which was empowered by both the scale of the Ramnit infection and the ZeuS financial data-sniffing capabilities. This synergy has enabled Ramnit to bypass two-factor authentication and transaction signing systems, gain remote access to financial institutions, compromise online banking sessions and penetrate several corporate networks. With the use of a Sinkhole, we discovered that approximately 800,000 machines were infected with Ramnit from September to end of December 2011.

via Seculert Research Lab: Ramnit Goes Social.