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: Blood Thinner
A new compound can quickly counteract the action of an emerging class of drugs, offering a way to reverse the drugs’ actions if a patient develops serious side effects, US researchers said. They designed the compound to work with a new blood-thinner being developed for heart patients undergoing angioplasty to clear out blocked arteries. Such patients need to take blood thinners to prevent blood clots during surgery, but bleeding is a common side effect. Having an antidote on hand would make the treatments safer, said researchers at the Duke University Medical Centre. But instead of just reversing the effects of the blood thinner, the antidote agent appears to work against a whole new class of drugs called aptamers. The team tested these antidote molecules against eight different aptamer compounds in test tubes and found it controlled the activity of all of them. So far, Pfizer’s Macugen, a treatment for age-related macular degeneration, is the only aptamer drug currently approved for sale by the US Food and Drug Administration. But researchers behind the new breakthrough feel having an antidote to this emerging class of drugs would make them especially safe.
Fake Accounts
Researchers tracking a gang of online bank thieves found that the criminals have deployed a devious means to thwart law enforcement and anyone else trying to monitor their activities. The gang behind the URLZone trojan, which siphons money from online bank accounts and then alters a victim’s online bank statement to hide the fraud, have also devised a method to hide the accounts of mules they use to launder the siphoned funds.
Researchers at RSA’s FraudAction Research Labs say the gang was aware that their malware was being tracked by investigators, so they programmed their command and control server to generate non-mule accounts to make it more difficult for law enforcement and fraud investigators to halt laundering through the real accounts. The URLZone is a Trojan that has been targeting customers of several top German banks. The victims’ computers are infected with the Trojan after visiting compromised legitimate websites or rogue sites set up by the hackers. Once a victim is infected, the malware detects when a user is logged into a bank account, then contacts a control centre hosted on a machine in Ukraine to initiate a money transfer from the victim’s account, without the victim’s knowledge. The fraudsters developed a series of tests to check infected computers...
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