New computer viruses are aimed at banks and social networks

Cybercriminals increasingly directed their attacks against hundreds of millions of users of social networks and against the holes in security systems for banks, according to various security software vendors.
At the same time, the messages of spam rose sharply in the third quarter, Symantec said.
And while Facebook in September reached 300 million accounts, networks and social media continue to attract criminals, said retail research firm F-Secure in a quarterly report on viruses.
"As Twitter has grown in popularity, has also been increasingly target worms, spam and account hijacking," said F-Secure. Cybercriminals widely used choose goals that allow them to go after more potential victims.

"Cyber-crooks continue to pursue the money," said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer of the small security software vendor Finjan, which on Wednesday unveiled a new method criminals use to steal money from bank accounts and hide their tracks.

Finjan said it expects to grow a tendency to use new software that replaces bank reported on screen, hiding the true amount of the transaction to trick account holders and their banks, and then sending the stolen money to accounts of third parties. "By combining the use of sophisticated Trojans theft and" mules "to transfer stolen money into their accounts, reduce chances of being detected," said Ben-Itzhak.

In the third quarter, the amount of spam increased to represent a 88.1 per cent of total email traffic, from 81 percent a year ago, said MessageLabs, Symantec, in its quarterly report .
MessageLabs said that botnets, networks of computers that run software independently, are now responsible for sending 87.9 percent of all spam.

Hackers exploit the vulnerability of computers to set traps on web pages with malicious code that are loaded into the machine. The infected computers become part of a 'botnet', a network of hijacked computers. They are used for identity theft, sending spam and other cyber crimes.

"During the past year, we saw a number of Internet service providers (ISP, its acronym in English) disconnected by host botnet activity, with (...) the consequent change in the power of botnets," he said in a statement MessageLabs analyst Paul Wood.

"However, this is not always the case, since the botnet technology has also evolved since late 2008 and the recent closures of ISPs now have less impact on the resulting activity, since the disconnection only lasts a few hours, instead of weeks or months before, "said Wood.