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Apr 21
2010
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According to the company Trusteer which helps online banks, brokerages, and retailers secure the consumer desktop from online attacks and fraudulent websites, Zeus has comeback. The infection that is also known as Zbot, WSNPOEM, NTOS and PRG has been seen in several computers again. Trusteer said that one in every 3000 computers from the 5.5 Millions PCs they monitor are infected.
Zeus is the #1 botnet, with 3.6 million PCs infected in the US alone (i.e. approximately 1% of the PCs in the US), according to a recent report.
Although the total amount of computers this time is over 1800, which is not a huge number, many experts know that these cases can spread as wildfire. Zeus is specially designed to steal login information by recording keystrokes from the infected systems. It can infect PCs using Firefox and Internet Explorer browsers. After the infection, it steals all necessary information and sends it to a remote server where cyber-pirates later can access it.
In an interview Amit Klein, chief technology officer at Trusteer said
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,
In a research done by them, it shows that having an antivirus up to date and maintaining it can reduce only the probability of infection by only 23% which in reality is a dangerous number. The only way to be careful about this threat besides updating your antivirus is by putting attention which sites you visit, and which links you open.
