Privacy, Security & Virus Information

Battle to Arrest the Development of Zeus, the Worst Trojan Horse to Date

Recognised as being among the most lethal and difficult pieces of malware ever to hit the market Zeus, if not contained, will empty the back accounts of innocent people who leave themselves susceptible to this powerful yet seemingly easy-to-operate piece of software. The Zeus Trojan horse, if it succeeds in a computer, will rapidly find its way to the most sensitive of personal information, such as online bank account details, passwords and credit card numbers, and will cause havoc with the information accessed.

News of the Zeus malware first came to the authority's attentions in the UK a few weeks ago, through information that the malware's operators were searching for victims through the social networking sites. The Zeus Trojan horse operates in such a fashion that if it invades a computer it will cause it to forward sensitive and personal data to servers which are under the control of the hackers. Zeus has reared its ugly head in a number of forms already, with the most damaging to date being a false Facebook page that encouraged users to download a tainted software update. Two young hackers who were behind that particular scam were arrested on 3 November in Manchester, and are currently being held under the 1990 Computer Misuse Act and the 2006 Fraud Act pending charges, with details of the arrests only just being released.

Zeus is what is known as a banking Trojan. While it is a measure of the determination as well as the levels of sophistication that hackers are achieving to create fraud on a massive scale, this is one of the first times that an actual web page on a social networking site has been seen to be used to infiltrate the unsuspecting computer surfer's hard disc.

Trojans are usually distributed as attachments in email messages, yet increasingly more as software downloads masquerading as legitimate programs. Zeus has been set up to utilize a variety of different methods to steal details, including logging key stokes as a user-entered password. The total number of computers that have attacked at some time or another by a trojan horse is almost impossible to ascertain, but thought to run to several million. The truth is that it is almost impossible to detect the Zeus Trojan software, as it can change its identity during the time that it is in operation. Zeus often changed in order to avoid detection by anti-virus software.

Zeus is apparently being sold and distributed among the hacker fraternity, and is in great demand due to its low cost, ease of use and sophistication. Hackers buy it in a tool kit form, which can be manipulated to form a unique variant. Once the Zeus hacker succeeds in accessing either a Facebook or MySpace password, they can use the invaded account as a springboard for sending out more attacks to their friends and family. It can spread like wildfire through the entire framework, and there is evidence that it has already succeeded in doing so on several occasions.

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