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July 28, 2008

Cyberoam-Commtouch Report: Universities and ISPs Cyber Warfare Targets in 2Q 2008


Cyberoam (News - Alert), a provider of identity-based Unified Threat Management (UTM) solutions, released Q2 2008 e-mail threat trend report prepared in association with Commtouch, a provider of anti-spam and zero-hour anti-virus protection solutions, said an announcement from the company today.



 
The report finds that the last quarter cyber attacks targeted user groups, mainly Internet service providers (ISPs), educational institutions, Hotmail subscribers and Google (News - Alert) Adwords users.
 
According to the report, the attackers exploited the psychological behavior of users in large user groups and through the media that they trusted the most.
 
The report detected about 10 million zombies in the second quarter of 2008, most of which originated from dynamic Internet Protocol (IP) addresses. Zombies created huge impact by deactivating many IPs, making them vulnerable to fresh attacks, and switching among IPs to bypass traditional security measures.
 
The zombie botmasters exploited ISP infrastructure to send spam on to the Internet, according to the report. ISPs are meant to handle double tasks – protect their users against incoming spam and shield them from being used by zombies to send out spam. The latter was a difficult task for ISPs as it would result in blacklisting of IP ranges of the ISPs, preventing many legitimate outbound e-mails from being treated as normal. Zombies also abused network resources of ISPs by reducing network speed.
 
Phishing and spam messages, which prompted customers to reveal sensitive personal information such as banking passwords and credit card numbers, continued to claim fresh victims, said the report. Some of these attacks were disguised as messages from IT departments, prompting users, especially university students and faculty members, to reveal their personal information and passwords. Another type of phishing scam attacked Google Adwords account owners by luring them to legitimate Google links that redirected the users to a phishing site hosted on a Chinese domain.
 
The study also pointed at a new form of Bayesian poisoning in which spammers used the disclaimer message content in Hotmail messages to bypass content-based filters. The message also contained a link to a hosted image of a pharmaceutical ad. With the Hotmail disclaimer lowering users’ guard, users confirmed the validity of their e-mail IDs by viewing the image, also becoming easy targets in the future.
 
There were also reports of attacks using socially engineered subject lines manipulating the blogger community and the U.S. taxpayers. Some of the subject lines were intended to exploit human emotions and called for aid to earthquake victims in China, while the body text contained links that led users to malicious Web sites.
 
Abhilash Sonwane, VP, product management, Cyberoam, said, “Duplicity in the virtual world continues with increased vitality, thanks to the new and innovative methods of spammers to manipulate Internet users. New and easily vulnerable user groups are being targeted today with techniques that can deceive even the more experienced in the industry.”
 
Cyberoam’s identity-based policies can control user activities within the network and thus prevent exploitation by attackers, added Sonwane. Along with Commtouch’s Rapid Pattern Detection and outbreak prevention technologies, Cyberoam offers a comprehensive level of protection from all types of spam, malware and other Internet threats.
 
According to officials, Cyberoam’s UTM appliances provide greater granular controls to organizations in creating user-based policies and offering clear visibility in the network.
 
Rajani Baburajan is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Rajani’s articles, please visit her columnist page.
 





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