Malware infiltrates PNB website

While PNB officials in New Delhi could not be contacted despite repeated attempts,bank’s Regional Manager V P Goswami said he was not aware about the incident.

Saumil Shah,CEO of Net-Square,said he had reported the incident on January 9,when one of his employees opened the website to check the account his father holds with the bank.

“On opening the website,we found that at least 30 to 40 emails were sent randomly from the computer,” said Shah. On checking the source code,they found a script which was responsible for the behaviour.

He added that the site was under attack of the drive-by virus,which can get into the visitors computer through a website.

Sanjeev Shah,an IT security expert,said,“The hyperlink on the PNB website suggested that it was hacked. Such infiltrations are called bot attacks,wherein when a user clicks on the hyperlink,the malicious software automatically gets entry to the user’s computer,” said Sanjeev.

The botnets are capable of scanning,retrieving and sending data to the remote computer which is controlled by a bot master,he added.

According to experts,this is a recent phenomenon,which will be used increasingly by hackers in 2010.

A recent report by McAfee,a leading anti-virus software developer,has found that botnet will be used increasingly to attack social networking sites and the banking sector.

“Several small US banks were recently attacked in this manner,” said Shah.