|  By MAE ANDERSON

NEW YORK (AP) — A hacking ring has stolen up to $1 billion from banks around the world in what would be one of the biggest banking breaches known, a cybersecurity firm says in a report scheduled to be delivered Monday.

The hackers have been active since at least the end of 2013 and infiltrated more than 100 banks in 30 countries, according to Russian security company Kaspersky Lab.

After gaining access to banks’ computers through phishing schemes and other methods, they lurk for months to learn the banks’ systems, taking screen shots and even video of employees using their computers, the company says.

Once the hackers become familiar with the banks’ operations, they use that knowledge to steal money without raising suspicions, programming ATMs to dispense money at specific times or setting up fake accounts and transferring money into them, according to Kaspersky. The report is set to be presented Monday at a security conference in Cancun, Mexico. It was first reported by The New York Times.

The hackers seem to limit their theft to about $10 million before moving on to another bank, part of the reason why the fraud was not detected earlier, Kaspersky principal security researcher Vicente Diaz said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

The attacks are unusual because they target the banks themselves rather than customers and their account information, Diaz said.

The goal seems to be financial gain rather than espionage, he said.

“In this case they are not interested in information. They’re only interested in the money,” he said. “They’re flexible and quite aggressive and use any tool they find useful for doing whatever they want to do.”

Most of the targets have been in Russia, the U.S., Germany, China and Ukraine, although the attackers may be expanding throughout Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Europe, Kaspersky says. In one case, a bank lost $7.3 million through ATM fraud. In another case, a financial institution lost $10 million by the attackers exploiting its online banking platform.

Kaspersky did not identify the banks and is still working with law-enforcement agencies to investigate the attacks, which the company says are ongoing.

The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, a nonprofit that alerts banks about hacking activity, said in a statement that its members received a briefing about the report in January.

“We cannot comment on individual actions our members have taken, but on balance we believe our members are taking appropriate actions to prevent and detect these kinds of attacks and minimize any effects on their customers,” the organization said in a statement. “The report that Russian banks were the primary victims of these attacks may be a significant change in targeting strategy by Russian-speaking cybercriminals.”

The White House is putting an increasing focus on cybersecurity in the wake of numerous data breaches of companies ranging from mass retailers like Target and Home Depot to Sony Pictures Entertainment and health insurer Anthem.

The administration wants Congress to replace the existing patchwork of state laws with a national standard giving companies 30 days to notify consumers if their personal information has been compromised.

eBay is the latest victim of a cyberattack, and if you are one of the 145 million users with an account, you’re likely affected.

While eBay is urging users to update their passwords immediately (here’s how to do that), many are left wondering what this means for their data and what they can do to keep it safe.

The breach, which was confirmed by investigators this week, happened in early May (not late February and early March, as eBay first said) when hackers snatched up information such as usernames, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers and dates of birth. The hackers were even able to access passwords, but they were in encrypted form, so it’s unlikely they were compromised.

eBay said no financial information was taken and that the cyberattackers found their way in through employee login information.

While your credit card information may be safe, experts believe the ramifications of the security breach could be vast.

“The impact of the eBay compromise will likely spread beyond just eBay because people often reuse passwords across multiple sites,” Trey Ford, global security strategist at Rapid7, told Mashable. “It’s hard to predict just how serious that might be, and there may be other compromises that happen as a result that are never directly tied back to this breach. Users really need to change their passwords as soon as possible, and avoid reusing passwords across sites.”

The news comes just a few weeks after an encryption flaw called the Heartbleed bug affected many popular websites and services such as Gmail and Facebook. The bug quietly exposed sensitive account information, such as passwords and credit card numbers, over the past two years and went widely undetected until recently.

Following the Heartbleed bug news, a survey conducted by Software Advice revealed 67% of web users didn’t update their passwords.

With enough time and resources, Ford says, a hacker can fly under the radar for a while; until he is able to steal information, it’s challenging for an organization to defend against or detect it.

“Big companies have incredibly complex environments, with hundreds of thousands of users and systems they need to monitor, which means there are a lot of potential entry points for attackers to target,” Ford said. “And in the case of big companies, they often are targets for attackers because they have a lot of customers and a lot of valuable data. So attackers that are well-resourced will invest real time in casing a large company to find a way in, which frequently involves manipulating the company’s employees or trusted network in some way.”

Similar to other high-profile breaches, hackers move slowly in order to remain stealthy.

While eBay’s breach might even be larger than Target’s large-scale attack, which affected its 40 million card devices at checkout stations across stores nationwide and about 110 million shoppers earlier this year, it depends on how you look at the two cases.

“Payment details were not taken at eBay so the question comes down to the value of the data,” said Raj Samani, VP at McAfee.

Staying safe

While security breaches are becoming increasingly common, it’s a reminder to always keep on top of password management, too. Passwords should also be updated because eBay stores private customer information that can be used against the user in subsequent phishing scams, said Darren Guccione, CEO of password management firm Keeper Security.

“There is always risk of future loss so the key is to practice good password management,” Guccione added. “We encourage consumers to change passwords on their most important and frequently used sites every six months. When creating a password, it’s important to use letters, numbers and symbols which can be accomplished with a password manager.”

InformationWeek, Michael Endler

XP users shouldn’t expect additional support from Microsoft, despite its heroic last-minute security update for Internet Explorer.

Many Windows XP users are no doubt relieved that Microsoft decided to include Windows XP in a security update for a recently-disclosed bug — but they shouldn’t assume support will continue. Microsoft said XP remains an unsupported product, and that it made an exception to include it in this update only because the issue arose so near the operating system’s end-of-life deadline.

Microsoft began deploying the update around 1 p.m. EST on Thursday. Users who have enabled automatic updates shouldn’t need to take any action. Otherwise, users can access the update via the Control Panel’s Windows Update section. Microsoft rarely releases out-of-cycle updates like this one. Most arrive during the company’s monthly Patch Tuesday releases.

After disclosing the bug last weekend, Microsoft suggested a number of workarounds, many of which were inapplicable to XP machines. In a blog post, Microsoft Trustworthy Computing GM Adrienne Hall encouraged XP users to upgrade.

Image: Nick Perla (Flickr)

She wrote that today’s cyberthreats are too sophisticated for an operating system first released over a decade ago. Microsoft officials have repeated this message countless times in recent months, but many users remain unpersuaded; over a quarter of PC users still relied on XP in April, according to web-tracking firm Net Applications.

Attacks against XP are already ongoing, according to FireEye, the security firm that took credit for discovering the vulnerability and gave it its nickname, “Operation Clandestine Fox.”

In a Thursday blog post, the firm said it has detected a “version of the attack that specifically targets out-of-life Windows XP machines running IE 8.” FireEye said earlier attacks involved only IE 9, 10, and 11 on Windows 7 and 8. The bug affects all versions of IE from 6 to 11. The firm warned that the new method that involves XP “means the risk factors of this vulnerability are now even higher.”

FireEye said it initially observed attacks against the defense and financial sectors but has since detected campaigns against government and energy institutions as well.