16 October 2016

On Tuesday the Group of the Seven industrial powers agreed on guidelines for protecting the global financial sector from cyber-attacks. At the same time, reports about a new trojan called Odinaff appeared in the media. Financial institutions all over the world have been attacked in the past 9 months. And also SWIFT users. For technical details please see the excellent post ‘Odinaff: New Trojan used in high level financial attacks’ published in the Symantec Blog.

The G7 cyber-security guidelines have come just at the right time. Or, perhaps too late? From the Symantec report one learns that the technology used by the trojan is not new at all. For example, payloads hidden in password secured rar-files have already been used in the past.

It almost seems as though the cyber security groups of the banks haven’t learned from the past: Password protected attachments are potentially dangerous, and should be blocked in the first instance. Never deliver those files to the end-users!

In addition, cyber-security awareness campaigns for end-users had not been effective or had not taken place. ‘One’s mind is the best weapon’, hence well-trained people are the most effective preventive measure in the protection against cyber-attacks.

Have a good weekend.