British detectives have arrested two individuals with suspected links to an insidious data-stealing Trojan horse known as Zbot. ??According to Sophos security analyst Graham Cluley, hackers designed the Zbot Trojan to harvest bank account and social networking passwords from unsuspecting victims.
“Once a hacker has your bank account information they can login and potentially transfer money to other accounts. If they break into your Facebook page they could use that to spread spam and phishing messages to the compromised account’s online buddies,” said Cluley. ??
“Typical versions of the Zbot Trojan horse have been spammed out to unsuspecting Internet users, using a variety of social engineering tricks to try to trick the unwary into opening an attachment or clicking on a link to a website hosting malware.”
Cluley also warned that the Trojan hijacked infected computers by adding them to a nefarious criminal botnet.
“Hackers control thousands of compromised computers around the world – using them as a zombie army to spew out spam, spread more malware and launch denial-of-service attacks.”
Finally, Clueley emphasized that the rapidly spreading Zbot pandemic was not confined to the UK.
“It’s worth bearing in mind, of course, that although the arrests have been in the UK, the Zbot family of malware is a problem that has been hitting computer users around the world – it is truly a global threat.”
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