Filipino expertise in information technology (IT) was
once again recognized worldwide after a local team discovered the rapidly
spreading infection Italian Job “malware” (malicious software) and became one of
the first to provide solutions.
The Italian Job malware started from an attack on
Italian tourism sites, among the thousands of legitimate websites “hijacked”
daily by cyber criminals.
More than 10,000 Web sites have been infected with
software that commandeers computers visiting them.
According to Raimund Genes, TM’s chief technology
officer of the Anti-Malware, malware is different from computer virus in a way
that a virus is transferred only when a user opens an infected
e-mail.
“Malware is different because it can infect a computer
once you click a web site, which hackers already hacked. And there were at least
2,000 new reports of malware everyday,” Genes said.
“The bad guys behind malware will be able to trace all
key strikes in your computer,” he said.
Teams from the Trend Micro Incident Response
Team-Antivirus department, who were just about to change shift last June 16,
started receiving several reports of apparent malevolent cyber activity until
they discovered it to be the Italian Job.
Bernard Bisuña, director of the Trend Micro
Anti-Malware Services, said the modus operandi is strikingly familiar — hacked
Italian Web sites that trigger a series of malware downloads once a user visits
them.
After noticing the pattern, Ryan Flores, team leader
of the Trend Micro Incident Response Team-Antivirus department and Carolyn
Guevarra alerted their counterparts in Japan, United States, Germany, and
Latin America.
“We immediately worked and blocked all related URLs
(Uniform Resource Locators) to disable malicious file download,”
Flores said.
“The malware has been spreading for a week and has
already infected more than 10,000 websites worldwide when we detected and
blocked it,” he said.
The Philippine-TM’s accomplishment was not left
unnoticed, in fact TM Chief Executive Officer Eva Chen, who is based in
California, thanked the team for a
job well done.
The Trend Micro teams were also being mentioned by
other Internet security experts in various blogs for their success in combating
malware like Italian Job.
“We are happy that we were able to bring prestige and
honors that we are one of the best IT experts worldwide,” Guevarra
said.
Genes noted that there is a need to combat the
increasingly damaging security threat on the Internet. “The latest web threats
in the face of Italian Job infection, which recently happened in Europe, would
also make the Philippines vulnerable without security infrastructure in
place.”
Trend Micro is one of the leading players in the
antivirus and Internet security industry with TrendLabs as its backbone on
service infrastructure.
It plays a vital role in monitoring potential security
threats and conducting research used to develop technologies to identify, detect
and eliminate new threats, providing business with round-the-clock threat
surveillance and attack prevention.
For Flores and Guevarra, blocking the Italian Job is
another day’s work.
The friends you invite are automatically added to your friends list. Keep me up to date with your progress. Good luck. I’m confident if you give this enough time and energy it will work and pay off for years to come… I’m going to post my monthly earnings for the non-believers. This is only day 10! 
