Security company Trusteer has today warned that the Zeus virus, a trojan that steals online banking details from infected machines, is back and apparently stronger than before.
The company said it had spotted the virus in the wild on 3,000 out of the 5½ million computers it monitors in the UK and the USA.
Zeus, which can infect users through either the Internet Explorer or Firefox web browsers steals login information by recording keystrokes from its list of target websites. This data is then sold on to criminals.
“We expect this new version of Zeus to significantly increase fraud losses, since nearly 30% of internet users bank online with Firefox and the infection is growing faster than we have ever seen before,” said Amit Klein, chief technology officer at Trusteer.
Zeus was dealt a heavy blow back in March when the Kazakhstani ISP, the host for the Zeus botnet, was cut off. However internet fraudsters and criminals are usually quick to respond and it doesn’t take long for new hosting to be found.
My advice at www.thelongclimb.com as always is to keep your anti-virus and anti-spyware up to date. Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 also include as standard an on-screen keyboard. This can be used when logging into websites, especially banking sites, to make the process much more secure.
Source : BBC
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