Sophisticated malware poses as your favorite news site, steals your data

A new, extremely sophisticated malware of totally unknown origin has hit the web. It poses as your favorite news site (aside from ExtremeTech that is), tempts you to click on intriguing links, then subsequently steals all of your sensitive information.

Nowadays, malware tends to focus on one thing: gaining access to something that isn’t already under the malware creator’s control. Generally, a piece of malware attempts to gain control of someone else’s rig or personal information. Sadly, the days of 1995′s cyberpunk classic Hackers – where the whole point of malware was to be a nuisance and could be thwarted by typing the word “cookie” into a prompt — are over. For better or worse (mostly worse), malware is no longer disguised as Cookie Monster’s face munching around a computer monitor, but are now disguised as your favorite sources of news.

Kaspersky Labs released an extensive report (PDF) regarding this new kind of malware. Dubbed Careto, the malware begins life as a phishing attempt, posing as an email from popular news websites. Once you click on the link, you’re brought to a website that scans your rig for vulnerabilities, then attempts to inject an infection through one of the newly discovered holes.

This time around, Mac users can’t deploy their infamous line regarding Macs not getting viruses, because there is a tailored Careto version for each major operating system — OS X, Windows, and Linux. Kaspersky also suspects that there are iOS and Android versions of Careto on the loose.