Easy money in Sweden

Filed in archive Spam News on February 7, 2007

According to ZDNet, Swedish bank Nordea has lost over 1 million dollars to a (very) successful spam and phishing heist:

"Nordea believes that 250 customers have been affected by the fraud, after falling victim to phishing emails containing the Trojan. According to McAfee, Swedish police believe Russian organised criminals are behind the attacks. Currently, 121 people are suspected of being involved.
The attack started by a tailormade Trojan sent in the name of the bank to some of its clients, according to McAfee. The sender encouraged clients to download a "spam fighting" application. Users who downloaded the attached file, called raking.zip or raking.exe, were infected by the Trojan, which some security companies call haxdoor.ki.
Haxdoor typically installs keyloggers to record keystrokes, and hides itself using a rootkit. The payload of the .ki variant of the Trojan was activated when users attempted to log in to the Nordea online banking site. According to the bank, users were redirected to a false home page, where they entered important log-in information, including log-in numbers."

It always impresses me how stupid and ignorant home computer users can be. Anyone who knows anything about today's world knows that banks do not send emails asking you to download something. Also, most of us also know that having an updated operating system and anti-virus software.

So what the hell is wrong with these people? The ones who got robbed in this case had no anti-virus software installed, whatsoever. They were like sitting ducks waiting to be robbed, zoombied or infected, which serves them right.

Sadly, it seems that they won't even get a chance to learn something from this, as the Nordea bank is going to reimburse every stolen penny. I think that noone should be allowed to use online banking if he doesn't have an anti-virus, firewall and brains installed.