Phishers aiming to defraud banks have raised their game - and at the very least have learned to spell - according to the banking executives tasked with stopping them.

According to David Shroyer, Bank of America senior vice president of online security and enrollment, the attacks fraudsters are targeting at financial services organizations are continuing to develop. For example, fraudsters are now building phishing sites with malware embedded in them which means the unwary risk not only losing their bank details but also getting malware on their PCs if they are tricked into visiting such sites.

"People are still clicking on the links to see if they are real and those who aren't adequately protected are getting infected," he told a session at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.

"We've educated our customers as an industry but the fraudsters aren't standing still," he added.

The fraudsters have fixed some of their basic problems too.

"The bad guys have invested in a spell checker," he joked, a reference to the poorly spelt and designed phishing emails and websites which characterized phishing attempts a few years ago.

But as the fraudsters increase the sophistication of their attacks, educating customers becomes more difficult. "Now we are talking about a much harder topic, about customer protection on the PC and safe browsing habits and that's a hard message to convey," said Shroyer.

Posted by Nancy Pursley in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 09:46

So, nothing happened?

Well, yes. Our labs, who’ve been monitoring carefully, note that Conficker changed communication protocols, just as the code said it would.

No doubt in the fullness of time, the botnet will start doing what botnets do: it would be bizarre to put this much effort into a project and then not try to make some profit out of it. And we’ll still be watching.

In the meantime, I suspect, based on past experience, that two things will happen.

Posted by Greg Hewitt-Long in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 10:57

The chaos predicted by some as the Conficker worm updates itself have so far failed to materialise.

There had been concerns that the worm could trigger poisoned machines to access personal files, send spam, clog networks or crash sites.

Many of the infected machines are based in Asia where there have been no reports of unusual PC behaviour.

Conficker is believed to have infected up to 15 million computers to date.

Those monitoring the progress of the worm as 1 April dawned around the globe said there was no evidence it was doing anything other than modifying itself to be harder to exterminate.

Posted by Greg Hewitt-Long in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 07:22

Reports are trickling in about the impact from the Conficker worm, as infected systems passed zero hour at midnight and began downloading additional malicious components.

Here's a quick roundup of some of the more notable incidents caused by Conficker so far, according to published reports:

- A nuclear missile installation near Elmendorf Air force Base outside of Anchorage, Alaska briefly went on a full-scale military alert after technicians manning the bunker suspected that several of their control systems were infected with Conficker.

Posted by Greg Hewitt-Long in Adware, Spyware and Trojans at 07:00