The hazards of outing ATM malware

From ATM Marketplace -

"In December 2013, Russian antivirus software developer Dr. Web announced that it had added protection to its ATM Shield product to block Trojan.Skimer.18 malware.

Threats followed immediately, according to a post on the Dr. Web blog. A message from either the programmer or the crime syndicate (Dr. Web isn't sure which) read, in part:

• ... the development of Dr.Web_ATM_shield threatens activity of Syndicate with multi-million dollar profit. Hundreds of criminal organizations throughout the world can lose their earnings.
• You have a WEEK to delete all references about ATM.Skimmer from your web resource. Otherwise syndicate will stop cash-out transactions and send criminal for your programmers’ heads.

When Dr. Web proved to be indifferent to the idea of criminal organizations losing their earnings, the "syndicate" firebombed Dr. Web offices. Twice."



Read more>>

No Such Thing as Hackerproof

From CIO Deloitte Journal

“Many organizations may have a false sense of security, perhaps even complacency, resulting from their investments in non-agile security tools and processes they have relied on for years. Yet firewalls, antivirus, intrusion detection systems (IDS) and intrusion prevention systems (IPS) are increasingly less effective as attackers leverage encryption and other innovative techniques to evade them. Many companies are failing to detect long-dwell cybercrimes in their IT environments and misallocating limited resources to lesser, more generic threats. Basic security blocking and tackling is valuable, but is in no way sufficient.

Organizations across many industries need to up their games. That can require changing the lens through which they view cyber risk -- not relying upon traditional security controls revealing tell-tale signs of an effective attack -- but leveraging intelligence and advanced techniques to identify the coming threat and proactively respond.”