Web Security Firm Warns of Obfuscated Code

A recent compromise at a corporation led to a significant amount of data being stolen, underscoring that traditional software defenses are hard pressed to catch obfuscated attacks, security firm Finjan said in its monthly analysis of Internet threats. In the report, dubbed the Malicious Page of the Month, the company claims that a desktop PC at an unnamed firm had been infected with a data-stealing Trojan horse. The attack succeeded because the firms antivirus software and static Web filters could not identify the scrambled attack code as a threat, Finjan stated in the report. The result: The malicious software downloaded code from a server in Utah and sent files and transcripts of a number of corporate users to a second server in Texas