OWASP Anti-Malware Project - Awareness Program

Banking Malware Attack Process
The process involving Malware attack require the subsequent verification of each of the following steps to be successful. We consider an attack to be successful if the attacker obtain a financial gain from the initial client attack. The first two steps do not involve the Banking infrastrucure, while some other are tightly connected since attackers need to use the functionalities offered by the hacked online bank accounts to do cash outs.

From user infection to cash out process:
(Image is missing)

This is a chain of required steps. Attackers need to perform successfully each of these for turning the attack into a monetary gain. For this reason the process can be reasonably stopped at any level. As in other cases a defense in depth approach is suggested to be effective against the weakest link of each part of the attack.

Infection of User clients and pcs Exploitation of client side vulnerabilities (during internet browsing) Spam (Infection delivered via Email)

Hiding The Infection and creating the Permanent threat Packers Modded Builds Rootkit (and Bootkit)

Stealing of Auth credentials KeyLogging and Form Grabbing Video Grabbing WebInjects

Storing of Auth credentials Standard Dropzone Fast Flux Based Server Instant Messaging and P2P network

Hiding The Operations Data Tunnelling Modification of Contact Details User Interface Restoring

Cashing Out Money Transfer Mobile Phone Charge Pump and Dump

General strategy
Narrowing the attack surface Identification Blocking Recovering

Actions to take for mitigating the Malware Attack Process
Containing the number of infected customers Awareness (e.g. Remember to the users about Antivirus programs) Check for software updates and potentially exposed customers Monitoring for Anomalies

Unhide the Infection Tell to your customers about the infections Use systems for detecting compromised clients Have in place a security response process to assist customers

Counterfeat the Stealing of Auth credentials Resilient Authentication Inform the user about their own operations Multi factor and Multi channel

Against the Remote Storaging of Auth Credentials Identification and Alerting about Dropzones Dropzone security response Browser Sand boxing

Against Cashing Out Mule accounts monitoring Monitor money transfer sources Monitor and correlate sources for any disposal operation