Security News

Wells Fargo customers who use Zelle to send and request payments suffer more than twice the rate of fraud and other online scams as people using other big banks, according to US Senator Elizabeth Warren. Warren chastised both financial firms in letters to their CEOs this week: she said Wells Fargo had sent her an "Evasive and misleading reply," and Zelle parent company Early Warning Services had made "Inaccurate" claims, in response to an investigation she led into banking fraud that stems from Zelle's payment system.

Roid users are often advised to get mobile apps from Google Play, the company's official app marketplace, to minimize the possibility of downloading malware. "Distribution through droppers on official stores remains one of the most efficient ways for threat actors to reach a wide and unsuspecting audience. Although other distribution methods are also used depending on cybercriminals targets, resources, and motivation, droppers remain one of the best option on price-efforts-quality ratio, competing with SMiShing," Threat Fabric researchers recently pointed out, after sharing their discovery of several apps on Google Play functioning as droppers for the Sharkbot and Vultur banking trojans.

The Robin Banks phishing-as-a-service platform is back in action with infrastructure hosted by a Russian internet company that offers protection against distributed denial-of-service attacks. Robin Banks faced operational disruption in July 2022, when researchers at IronNet exposed the platform as a highly threatening phishing service targeting Citibank, Bank of America, Capital One, Wells Fargo, PNC, U.S. Bank, Santander, Lloyds Bank, and the Commonwealth Bank.

Five malicious dropper Android apps with over 130,000 cumulative installations have been discovered on the Google Play Store distributing banking trojans like SharkBot and Vultur, which are capable of stealing financial data and performing on-device fraud. Targets of these droppers include 231 banking and cryptocurrency wallet apps from financial institutions in Italy, the U.K., Germany, Spain, Poland, Austria, the U.S., Australia, France, and the Netherlands.

As one of the oldest banking trojans - dating back to the mid-2000s - the software nasty has a number of variants and been given a few monikers, including URSNIF, Gozi, and ISFB. It's crossed paths with other malware families, had its source code leaked twice since 2016 and, according to Mandiant, is now less a single malware family than a "Set of related siblings." In a report this week, Mandiant researchers Sandor Nemes, Sulian Lebegue, and Jessa Valdez wrote that a strain of URSNIF's RM3 version is no longer a banking trojan but a generic backdoor, similar to the short-lived Saigon variant.

This article lists key best practices for API security in open banking to help manage and minimize these risks. The best practices for API Security in open banking Go beyond the traditional methods and best practices for API security.

Malicious actors are resorting to voice phishing tactics to dupe victims into installing Android malware on their devices, new research from ThreatFabric reveals. Telephone-oriented attack delivery, as the social engineering technique is called, involves calling the victims using previously collected information from fraudulent websites.

An SMS-based phishing campaign is targeting customers of Indian banks with information-stealing malware that masquerades as a rewards application. The Microsoft 365 Defender Research Team said that the messages contain links that redirect users to a sketchy website that triggers the download of the fake banking rewards app for ICICI Bank.

The notorious Android banking trojan known as SharkBot has once again made an appearance on the Google Play Store by masquerading as antivirus and cleaner apps. "This new dropper doesn't rely on Accessibility permissions to automatically perform the installation of the dropper Sharkbot malware," NCC Group's Fox-IT said in a report.

Massive amounts of private data - including more than 300,000 biometric digital fingerprints used by five mobile banking apps - have been put at risk of theft due to hard-coded Amazon Web Services credentials, according to security researchers. In all, 77 percent of these apps contained valid AWS access tokens that allowed access to private AWS cloud services, the intelligence team noted in research published today.