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'Fireball' Malware Can Steal Data, Warns CERT In

'Fireball' Malware Can Steal Data, Warns CERT-In 103u3j

By Press Trust of India | Updated: 8 June 2017 10:31 IST

Highlights

Fireball steals sensitive data and manipulates regular surfing data
CERT-In has issued its latest advisory to Internet s
It said the virus can be detected by majority of anti-virus solution

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Cyber-security sleuths have alerted Internet s against the destructive activity of a browser-attacking virus- 'Fireball'- that steals sensitive data and manipulates regular surfing activity. 5zh5k

The malware has been spreading across the globe and possesses over two dozen aliases and spreads by bundling and "without the 's consent".

"It has been reported that a malware named as 'Fireball' targeting browsers is spreading worldwide.

"It has the ability to collect information, manipulate web-traffic to generate ad-revenue, malware dropping and executing malicious code on the infected machines," the Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-In) said in its latest advisory to Internet s.

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The CERT-In is the nodal agency to combat hacking, phishing and to fortify security-related defences of the Indian Internet domain.

The agency said the malware or the virus can be "detected by majority of the anti-virus solutions" and it has advised Internet s to install updated anti-virus solutions to protect their computers from this infection.

It said the virus, 'Fireball', "currently installs plug-ins and additional configurations to boost its ments but it could be used as distributor for any additional malware in future."

"It is reported that the malware 'Fireball' is used by one of the largest marketing agency to manipulate the victims' browsers and changes their default search engines and home pages into fake search engines.

"It also re-directs the queries to either Google.com. The fake search engines also collects the s' private information," the advisory said.

'Fireball', it said, is capable of acting as a browser-hijacker, manipulating web traffic to generate ad-revenue, capable of ing further malware, capable of executing any malicious code on the victim machine and collects information and steals credentials from the victim machine.

The CERT-In has also suggested some counter-measures: "Do not click on banners or pop-up or ads notifications, do not visit untrusted websites and do not or open attachment in emails received from untrusted sources or unexpectedly received from trusted s."

It said a , in order to exercise caution after logging-in the system, should check for default setting of web browsers, such as homepage, search engine, browser extensions and plug-ins installed, and if something is found unknown, then it should be deleted.

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'Fireball' Malware Can Steal Data, Warns CERT-In 103u3j

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