Singapore has netted a trojan phisher, the Straits Times reports.
A Vietnamese computer engineering student at the National University of Singapore, Nguyen Van Phi Hung, has been charged under the Computer Misuse Act for tagging a keylogger onto an email invitation to fellow students to play an online game called ‘Bubble’.
He then captured passwords and gained access to a student’s DBS Bank online account, which he then used to buy prepaid international phonecards and subscribe to a magazine. His case is unique in Singapore, the Straits Times says, for using a Trojan Horse to obtain passwords for making money.
A couple of points: taken together with the recent UK case where a British man is accused of using a fake website to grab passwords to the Internet arm of the Co-operative Bank Smile, one might think the authorities are onto the phishers. Not so. All these cases show is that there are copycats out there, but these are minnows. The big boys are still playing, using every trick to lure the unwary.
Second point: The program Hung used was Perfect Keylogger, readily available program for about $35. There is a strong case to be made for outlawing these kind of programs. While some are touted as ways to monitor wayward employees or offspring, let’s face it: They’re dangerous and evil. Perfect Keylogger, for example, touts its “handy remote installation feature. You can attach the keylogger to any other program and send it by e-mail to install on the remote PC in the stealth mode. Then it will send keystrokes, screenshots and websites visited to you by e-mail or FTP!” If that’s not designed with a ne’er-do-well in mind, then I don’t know what is.
And it’s not hard to find: The keyword search on Google throws up 17,500 matches, a lot of them download sites. It also throws up five sponsored links, advertising “Award-winning spy software that records everything they do” or exhortations to “Record Everything! Email, Chat, IM, Web Sites, Files & More”. I bet there are a lot more Hungs out there that we don’t know about, and if people can make money off this software, the problem won’t go away.