Company in Debt from Thousands of Dollars lost as Cybercrooks Use Trojan to hack Firm

Cybercrooks have attacked a Californian Escrow Firm, stealing $465,000 from its bank account after exploiting several online banking security measures.

The security breach occurred in March when the owner of Village View Escrow opened an email attachment about an undelivered UPS package. The attachment was found to install a file housing a Banking Trojan, which immediately records and relays valuable online banking passwords to the cybercrooks.

The company's bank told the owner that the fraudulent transactions were issued from their regular IP address. This means the attackers used an advanced feature that trojans like Zbot come armed with. It is now a trend for cybercrooks to use very complex malware threats for the purpose of exploiting online banking institutions.

In this case of hacking the Escrow Firm, the fraudsters maliciously managed to disable the email notifications sent out by the online banking system after each transaction. Doing so left the company without any knowledge as to what exactly happened.

What happened behind the Firm's back is the crooks made two international money transfers of $88,000 and $94,000 to bank accounts in Latvia. The rest of the stolen money was transferred to money mules (recruited workers through spam messages by cybercriminals) in the United States and wired out of the country.

Fortunately the bank was able to reverse transfers for $70,000, leaving Village View Escrow short of $395,000.

Events like this are evident of how cybercrooks are still able to attack banks. Cybercrime is only increasing and it is up to everyone to ensure that their business computer or even home system is protected. Do you imagine cybercrooks are able to steal money from large banking institutions with new clever malware threats?