1500 Hacked PayPal Accounts Sold on Underground Website

Security firm Webroot has identified an underground shop that’s selling access to over 1,500 PayPal accounts. Most of the compromised accounts belong to users from the United States.

The cybercriminals who sell the information provide potential buyers with information such as account holder’s first name, selling price, account type, balance, and if the associated credit card and bank account are confirmed or not.

For instance, a verified account with a balance of $3 (2 EUR) with the card and the bank confirmed is sold for $3 (2EUR). For $20 (15 EUR), anyone can purchase a verified “premier” account with a balance of $337 (252 EUR).

“What’s particularly interesting regarding this E-shop is the fact that the cybercriminal behind it tried to come up with a value-added service, in this case a built-in Socks5 proxy checker, to be used when interacting with the hacked PayPal accounts for greater anonymity,” Webroot’s Dancho Danchev explained.
The servers are apparently compromised hosts used as anonymization proxies that help cybercriminals avoid being tracked down too easily.

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Hacker sentenced for funding terrorist groups

A hacker 'Cahya Fitrianta' sentenced to eight years in prison by the West Jakarta District Court judges for hacking into many economic websites to steal money and funding that money to terrorist groups.

He is also ordered to pay a Rp 500 million ($51,000) fine. He is charged with breaking into many sites, for running online fraud of billions of dollars and fund that money to terrorist training in Poso, Central Sulawesi.

Cahya was arrested in May last year in a Bandung hotel. The defendant, along with another man, Rizki Gunawan. Police in May arrested Rizki, accusing him of hacking a marketing firm’s website to steal money in order to fund militant training.

They both accused of channeling money to terrorism suspect Umar Patek, who was sentenced this year to 20 years for his role in the 2002 Bali bombing.

“Aside from engaging in a vicious conspiracy, the defendant was also found guilty of laundering money, which he obtained from hacking the www.speedline.com website and used the proceeds to fund military training in Poso”

Meanwhile, the prosecutor decided to appeal because the sentence received is lower than demand and even it is lighter than the 12 years prosecutors.

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Ethiopian Kids Hacked OLPCs in Five Month with zero Instructions

About five months ago, OLPC Project decided to have a little experiment. They chose a village in Ethiopia where the literacy rate was nearly 0% and decided to drop off a bunch of Motorola Xooms there. On the tablets, there was custom software that was meant to teach kids how to read. The kicker is that they gave no instructions. They just dropped the box off at town square and walked away.

 

The devices in use were Motorola Zoom tablets—used together with a solar charging system, which OLPC workers had taught adults in the village to use. OLPC workers would swap the memory cards in the systems and analyze them to understand what the machines were being used for.

 

  

 

 

OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference last week: "We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."   

Timeline of Expirement

Within Four Minutes - One kid had opened the box and had figured out how to turn on the Xoom. within Five Days - The kids were using nearly 50 applications each every day. In Two Weeks - The kids were singing their ABC’s in English. now its 5th Month - They hacked the Motorola Xooms so they could enable the camera, which had been disabled by OLPC.

 

 

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Malware Circulations via skype

"LOL is this your new profile pic" is the malicious Skype message clubbed together with a shortened URL for circulating spiteful software through Skype message. This malicious content was clicked for over 480,000 times within 2 hours, claimed Kaspersky Lab Threat Analyst, Dmitry Bestuzhev, as reported in the website cso.com.au on October 11, 2012.

The compact URL is still receiving a few clicks and till now, it has racked up over 1 Million clicks in four days, starting from October 6, 2012.

According to Bestuzhev, almost half the clicks generated within 48 hours of the release of this malware, indicating that a huge number of contacts must have been infected during this term.

Nevertheless, the most pathetic part of it is that initially, only 2 of the present 44 antivirus engines identified the threat, but currently the number has increased to 27, which is still quite low. However, it also indicates that about 1 Million users must have clicked o the links and greeted infection on the links.

To strengthen the whole campaign, the malware distributors further translated the message into other languages including Latvian and Spanish ensuring that many Internauts are also included in this scheme.

Besides, the malware detected in this campaign is identified as Trojan.Win32.Bublik.jdb by Kaspersky, which is capable of controlling the affected machine. Beside the issue of Ransomware and click-fraud, ability to steal passwords associated with adult websites, file lockers, online banking and social media, including PayPal, Yahoo, Facebook, Netflix, The Pirate Bay, GoDaddy, and eBay is also raising concern in this case, added the security expert.

The Trojan also has the functionality of Autorun for spreading via USB devices. It has the ability of spreading through MSN Messenger and locally saved Skype passwords in the similar infected machine, thus switching automatically amid the available accounts.

As a recommendation, Kaspersky concluded that to safeguard oneself from this malware, don't click on links that are offered through Skype or through any other instant messaging service. Also, never download unknown archives and extract zip files for opening files, especially if you are unaware of the content

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