Security Agency warns about Trojan Attacks in UK

The National Infrastructure Security Co-ordination Centre in UK has warned that around three hundred key U.K. business and government organizations are under potential threat from data-stealing cyber attacks coming from Asia. The potential attackers are based in East Asia and they would be using Trojan horse programs to try to steal information from certain parts of the critical national infrastructure.

Departments being alerted about this threat include not only government agencies but also businesses in the finance, transportation, and telecommunications sectors. The report from the security agency said: “Parts of the U.K.’s critical national infrastructure are being targeted by an ongoing series of e-mail-borne electronic attacks. While the majority of the observed attacks have been against central government, other U.K. organizations, companies and individuals are also at risk.”

The mails carrying these kinds of Trojan horses normally pretend to be coming from reliable sources like friends and relative’s mail ids. Sometimes they also carry the name of popular government agencies. Phishing has become a threat on its own and many companies are currently involved in finding solutions for alerting the users about mails pretending to be from false sources.

The attacks have already begun in some cases as per the director of the NISCC, Roger Cumming who said: “We’ve worked hard to get this information into the public domain as quickly as possible. The majority of attacks exploit known vulnerabilities. If there was a word to use here, it would be patch.”