Director Ashley Madison Departs After Massive Hack

The director of Ashley Madison has resigned after attackers managed to steal confidential data of 32 million users, including names, addresses, email addresses and hashed passwords. Also all kinds of confidential business information were stolen, including e-mails.

It was gigabytes of data that have been published in part last week. In a statement enables Avid Life Media, the company behind Ashley Madison CEO Noel Biderman which has resigned and no longer works for the company. Until a new director was appointed the existing management team will lead the company. The company also states that it is still working on the settlement of the attack and actively with international investigative agencies work together to identify the perpetrators.

G Data: Attack Bundestag With Financial Malware

During the attack on the network of the German Bundestag last week, performed financial malware is used. This was reported by the German anti-virus company G Data that has studied the attack. At present it is not clear whether it is a new attack, or a continuation of the attacks in late May 2015 came to light.

According to the researchers there discovered the last attack of the Swatbanker banking Trojan used. This is a Trojan horse that is specifically designed to steal money from online bank accounts, although it can get other information. Research into the configuration files in the malware has made it clear that the administrators of the botnet Swatbanker between 8 and 10 June new filter functions have applied for the domain "bundestag.btg". This is the URL of the intranet of the Bundestag.

Once active malware can all data entered into forms, such as user names and passwords, as well as data from the browser to send the attackers. Swatbanker spreads through e-mails that appear to come from German banks and telecom providers."Looking at the first analyzes, it seems to be an attack with criminal intent. But we can not exclude other motives and the attackers have copied the behavior of criminals to disguise their true intentions," says Ralf Benzmüller , head of G Data Security Labs.

Microsoft Provides Alarm About Macro-Malware

To perform asking Internet users if they macros in Office documents so that their computer is infected with malware is a very successful method for cyber criminals, as the past few months more than half a million computers were infected in this way.

The malware is distributed via e-mails with subjects about bills, taxes, delivery confirmations, CVs and donation confirmations. Topics according to Microsoft, users can easily mislead to open the email and attachment without piggybacked hereby thinking. Once the macro is executed will download a file which then downloads a Trojan downloader. This downloader installs additional malware on the system. The software giant sets raises the question of how this form of social engineering can be combated.

In the case of enterprises, system administrators can take various measures. Most macro malware namely located in the .doc format used in Office 2007 and earlier. Administrators can set up via the Trust Center of Office that documents from earlier Office versions are not loaded. In addition, the operation of macros in Office can be configured , for example, to allow only digitally signed macros or block all macros.