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Researchers have uncovered an advanced malware-based operation that siphoned more than 600 gigabytes from about 70 targets in a broad range of industries, including critical infrastructure, news media, and scientific research.
The operation uses malware to capture audio recordings of conversations, screen shots, documents, and passwords, according to a blog post published last week by security firm CyberX. Targets are initially infected using malicious Microsoft Word documents sent in phishing e-mails. Once compromised, infected machines upload the pilfered audio and data to Dropbox, where it's retrieved by the attackers. The researchers have dubbed the campaign Operation BugDrop because of its use of PC microphones to bug targets and send the audio and other data to Dropbox.
"Operation BugDrop is a well-organized operation that employs sophisticated malware and appears to be backed by an organization with substantial resources," the CyberX researchers wrote. "In particular, the operation requires a massive back-end infrastructure to store, decrypt, and analyze several GB per day of unstructured data that is being captured from its targets. A large team of human analysts is also required to manually sort through captured data and process it manually and/or with Big Data-like analytics."
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 23 2017, @02:26PM
With the browser converging to be the one app that people use all the time, certain people are porting spy interfaces to javascript to not leave Unix users out.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Thursday February 23 2017, @06:04PM
We're gonna need to do some NoScript code reviews, or make open source browsers with full real-time scripting visibility: "This script is currently accessing your camera, that one just requested file X"
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Thursday February 23 2017, @08:21PM
I have no intention of giving my browser access to my microphone, camera or anything else.
Needless to say I am not popular with the "web is an app" crowd that want to reimplement the entire OS in the browser. Most sites don't work for me without JS, but thankfully the ones I really care about do.
I mean think about it. We have gpu access, canvas elements, file io, sockets, audio, input/output already, pretty much the core of an OS in browsers. Only thing missing is a scheduler with context switching so we can run more than one JS thread at a time, and there you go. An OS in everything but name really.