Zeus Trojan Stole Huge Amount of Information

Security experts at antivirus vendor "Sunbelt Software" has detected a huge amount of information stolen by a Zeus botnet. Zeus or Zbot (Zeus bot) is a malicious information stealing computer Trojan. This malicious Trojan has many forms, and is mostly used by financial scammers who intend to steal money from peoples' and organizations' bank account globally.

The Sunbelt security experts reveal that this Zeus Trojan is able to function as botnet clients, which connected to a command and control server to get instructions and upload the stolen information. As per the findings of the Zeus Tracker system controlled by abuse.ch, there are almost 1,500 Zbot C&C servers around the world, and half of them are online at any given point of time.

As per Sunbelt, the new found botnet is only another Zeus botnet. It is comparatively a small one - 5,100 particular infected host; however, the number of affected businesses is slightly frustrating.

Commenting on these findings, Adam Thomas (Sunbelt malware Specialist) stated that majority of the compromised hosts seemed to be home users. However, a large number of compromised hosts were associated with federal and state government agencies; the Fortune 500 and 100 companies; banks and drug companies, according to the report published by sunbeltblog.blogspot on July 20, 2010.

He also stated that it had been nearly four years since Zbot/Zeus circulating on the Net. Unfortunately, it was going strong and captured a high rank on Sunbelt's Top-10 detected threats list. In the beginning, hackers were careless about their server configurations and security researchers could easily find and recover the data stolen by Zbot Trojans. The criminals became more active and began to take measures to safeguard the stolen data.

To advise the affected organizations, the antivirus firm is collaborating with law enforcement agencies. According to them, this Trojan is really a threat to businesses and consumers globally. The antivirus firm has great difficulties to solve this threat, as abuse.ch reports almost 45% detection rate for Zeus binaries on an average.

Related article: Zeus Trojan Kits Detected by RSA

» SPAMfighter News - 8/3/2010