Call them the Coreflood Gang. A ring of cyber bank robbers from southern Russia has quietly perfected a way to get a beachhead inside company networks.
Once inside, it infects every PC within reach with a custom-made data-stealing program called Coreflood. The goal: go rip off bank accounts online.
Over the past 16 months, the Coreflood Gang has infected swaths of PCs inside thousands of companies, hospitals, universities and government agencies, says SecureWorks researcher Joe Stewart, who has tracked and documented the spread of Coreflood over that period.
"It's spying on you, capturing your log-ons, user names, passwords, bank balances, contents of your e-mail," Stewart says. "It can capture anything."
Coreflood is part of a class of malicious software, called banking trojans, designed primarily to help crooks break into bank accounts online. The number of banking trojans detected on the Internet this month topped 24,800, up from 3,342 at the start of 2006, security firm F-Secure says.
An infection usually starts when you visit a Web page implanted with a snippet of malicious coding. By simply navigating to the tainted page, your browser gets redirected, unseen, to a hub server that downloads the data-stealing program onto your hard drive.
Dozens of gangs specialize in banking trojans. They have it much easier than phishing scammers, who must lure victims into typing sensitive data on spoofed Web pages, says F-Secure researcher Patrik Runald.
"This is very organized crime," Runald says. "These gangs are hiring people and making tons of money."
The Coreflood Gang is among the most sophisticated. Stewart recently analyzed 500 gigabytes of stolen data stored on a rented hub server. He pinpointed 378,758 Coreflood infections inside thousands of organizations, small and large.
A workplace PC can get a new infection each time someone logs on. The most infections: a county school district with 31,425, a hotel chain with 14,093 and a health care company with 6,744. About 230 networks turned up with 50 or more Coreflood infections, while 35 networks each had 500 or more.
Gang members cull the stolen data for log-ons and account statements, especially bank accounts online with high balances. Next, they log into the accounts and make online cash transfers into "drop" accounts they control.
After having two hub servers shut down by the tech security community in May, the Coreflood Gang rented two new hubs and picked up where they left off. Today, they continue operations unimpeded, says Stewart.
Companies infiltrated by the Coreflood Gang need to rethink how they do network security. Employees surfing the Internet on work PCs ought to take pause. "If you don't understand the threats that are out there, then you probably should not be banking online," Stewart says.
By Byron Acohido, USA TODAY
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