Cridex | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

The United States Department of Justice today disclosed the identities of two Russian hackers and charged them for developing and distributing the Dridex banking Trojan using which the duo stole more than $100 million over a period of 10 years. Maksim Yakubets , the leader of 'Evil Corp' hacking group, and his co-conspirator Igor Turashev primarily distributed Dridex — also known as ' Bugat ' and ' Cridex ' — through multi-million email campaigns and targeted numerous organizations around the world. The State Department has also announced a reward of up to $5 million—the largest offered bounty to date for a cybercrime suspect—for providing information that could lead to the arrest of Yakubets, who remains at large. "Bugat is a multifunction malware package designed to automate the theft of confidential personal and financial information, such as online banking credentials, from infected computers," the DoJ said in its press release . &qu

In an effort to infect large number of people, cybercriminals have developed a new malicious software program that contains functionality to spread itself quickly. Geodo , a new version of the infamous Cridex (also known as Feodo or Bugat ) banking information stealing Trojan works in conjunction with a worm that sends out emails automatically to continue its self-spreading infection method, effectively turning each infected Windows system in the botnet for infecting new targets, Seculert warned . The Infected Windows systems in the botnet network download and install an additional piece of malware (i.e. an email worm) from the Botnet 's command and control servers, provided with approximately 50,000 stolen SMTP account credentials including those of the associated SMTP servers. The stolen SMTP credentials appeared to come from Cridex victims and with the help of those credentials, the malware then sends out emails from legitimate accounts to other potential victim

For years, securing a company's systems was synonymous with securing its "perimeter." There was what was safe "inside" and the unsafe outside world. We built sturdy firewalls and deployed sophisticated detection systems, confident that keeping the barbarians outside the walls kept our data and systems safe. The problem is that we no longer operate within the confines of physical on-prem installations and controlled networks. Data and applications now reside in distributed cloud environments and data centers, accessed by users and devices connecting from anywhere on the planet. The walls have crumbled, and the perimeter has dissolved, opening the door to a new battlefield: identity . Identity is at the center of what the industry has praised as the new gold standard of enterprise security: "zero trust." In this paradigm, explicit trust becomes mandatory for any interactions between systems, and no implicit trust shall subsist. Every access request, regardless of its origin,