Suspicious virus prowling in Indian cyberspace

The Indian cyberspace has been hit by the malicious activity of a potentially threatening virus which can execute phishing attacks to negatively alter users' personal data, country's lead cyber security agency has said.

The anti-cyber attacks agency Computer Emergency Response Team of India (CERT-In), has detected that the virus identified as 'Bioazih' which can acquire as many as five aliases to hide its evil designs and "can execute commands remotely, upload data, download and execute files" in an unauthorsied manner.

"It has been reported that a new malware having backdoor functionalities dubbed as 'Bioazih' is spreading.

"The malware propagates by means of spear phishing emails containing attached malicious document exploiting Microsoft Office vulnerability or the Remote Access Trojan (RAT) may infect the targeted users system by means of malware dropper also," CERT-In said in its latest advisory to internet users.

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

The virus' threat is critical as it belongs to the deadly 'Trojan' family and a 'spear phishing' attack is a clever activity done by an infectious malware to hit a healthy system stealthily.

The agency said the malware makes use of different techniques to maintain anonymity of its command and control servers or it sets up virtual private networks to host their servers in order to hide their actual locations.