The Chinese Year of the Rat begins next week. In the cyberunderground, it is already shaping up to be the Year of the intelligent Rat, as crooks scurry to perfect ways to steal notes and commit hoax.

One pioneering gang is taking by home network routers instead of PC hard drives, a sneakier way to hijack online accounts. Another has perfected a way to use compromised PCs to repeatedly visit on Net ads to generate ad payments to the crooks.

Phishing specialists are putting finer touches on scams to trick folks into divulging sensitive personal info on fake Web pages. Meanwhile, top-level crime rings are getting stealthier and more efficient at herding millions of compromised PCs, referred to as bots, into networks that they deploy to steal details, commit extortion and spread spam.

“We fully expect attacks to become even more frequent and continue to grow increasingly more sophisticated in 2008,” says Mary Landesman, senior researcher at protection firm ScanSafe.

What’s going on? Banks, retailers and Net companies constantly expand e-commerce via slick Web site features and high-speed World Wide Web connections. Doing so makes new doors and windows for cybercrooks to tryout. Cutting-edge breaches involve:

*Routers. One gang has begun sending out tainted e-mail greeting cards that, when opened, give the intruders control of the recipient’s router, the device that lets several PCs share the same World Wide Web connection. Targeting a router model popular in Mexico, these crooks have defrauded patrons of a large Mexican bank, says Zulfikar Ramzan, a senior principal researcher at Symantec.

Copy cats now are the concern. “This attack technique can be generalized quite easily to go after multiple router types and multiple banks,” Ramzan says.

*Phishers. Newly available at a French Web site: a turn-key phishing kit with everything needed to create bogus bank Web sites, including templates of official-looking bank letters requesting goods….

Orginal post by Top Tech News