Trojan

An online scam scheme sends junk email messages telling people that a hotel has mistakenly charged their credit card with a wrong payment. The result of being victimized is an infected PC.

According to reports the messages appeared on the net in recent days and so far there are hundreds of versions already. The main theme is: A hotel wrongly charged a credit card number and the victim is supposed to fill out an attached form to process the refund.

Cyber security experts found a new version of ZeuS Trojan that targets Android users to steal their money from their banking accounts, reports ThreatPost. The malware intercepts SMS messages which are sent to log into online banking cabinets.

The number of Android malware increased 10 times since the beginning of the year, shows recent stats.

Meantime, the number of criminal schemes using ZeuS has also increased since March when the initial code appeared online.
 

DrWeb anti-virus software provider compiled a report of the most interesting malware for April. Android OS related viruses turned to be the most popular platform for malicious applications among hackers.

A Windows Trojan has been adapted to infect Mac OS machines, according to the latest report by a security firm Sophos. The malware is being under development to set a backdoor on Macs with hackers behind the scheme seeking for potential buyers.

The author called the malware BlackHole RAT while security experts dubbed it as MusMinim. It is a version of Windows Trojan called darkComet. Net security firm Sophos describes the malware as "very basic", while even its author characterizes the malware as a work in progress.

A new banking Trojan was created by cyber crooks to steal funds from people’s accounts even when they logged out.

A finding published by Trusteer, the transaction security firm, shows that the new Trojan dubbed OddJob allows hackers to hijack customers’ online banking sessions in real time using their session ID tokens. As the session remains open perpetrators can freely rob people of their money.

The Trojan was discovered several months ago, but the firm is only now able to report it following the conclusion of a police investigation.

Banking customers in Poland were hit by a version of the Zeus malware that intercepts one-time pass codes sent via SMS. On Monday the security vendor F-Secure blogged about the attack on the clients of the Polish financial institution ING. The issue was further analyzed on the website of security consultant Piotr Konieczny.

The new attack appears to be the same type found by the Spanish security company S21sec last September.

Chinese users of Android smartphones are targeted by a new cybercrime attack to make them click on malicious links. The new Trojan poses as a wallpaper for the smartphone's screen or other legitimate applications, such as the popular game RoboDefense and is being infiltrated from the third-party mobile app stores in China. The official Android Market is not affected.

According to separate studies a great number of users still remain infected with PC malware even though their machines have security protections such as anti-virus software.

One study by European Union statistics agency EUROSTAT shows that 31% of PC users had malicious software in spite of the fact that 84% of users were running security apps including anti-virus, anti-spam and firewall. Besides, 3% of respondents also reported financial losses because of farming or phishing attacks, while a further 4 per cent reported privacy violations involving data sent online.

Researchers have found that at least 2,500 victims paid to hackers so that they would free them from the worm that had sized users’ PCs. A fast-spreading virus identified by Trend Micro as Worm_Rixobot.A has been spreading in recent weeks using infected porn websites, instant messaging applications and even infected USB drives.

Supporting the prognosis made by McAfee, Symantec's MessageLabs Intelligence: 2010 Annual Security Report reveal worrying malware trends in 2010 and makes gloomy forecast for 2011.

Another iteration of the infamous ZeuS Trojan was developed to be run only on high-end machines with fast performance. Security researchers usually deploy automation and virtualisation technologies to cope with the growing volume of malware spewed out by cybercrooks every day. Knowing this cyber crooks use virtual machine detection and anti-debugging code in their creations. This increases the time for security analysts to detect, develop and distribute anti-virus updates.

A new Trojan marked as "a serious enemy" is threatening corporate networks as it can be used as a corporate spying tool, warned the Internet security specialist BitDefender. The security vendor stated that Trojan.Spy.YEK sniffs for critical data and archives that may hold private information and sends them back to the attacker. It is a serious threat because the Trojan features both spying and backdoor capabilities, say BitDefender Malware Researchers Doina Cosovan and Octavian Minea.

Users of Firefox are being tricked into installing a Trojan that makes the browser to save all login credentials by default and subsequently uses the stolen information to create a new user account (username: Maestro) on the compromised machine. Then it steals personal user data from the Windows Protected Storage Area which is on a constant basis transferred to the crooks’ server.

The author behind the Trojan known as Salar “Salixem” Zeynali is an Iran-based crimeware hobbyist and heavy metal enthusiast, according to his Facebook profile.

55% of all new malware detected in the third quarter of the year was presented by Trojans according to the data from PandaLabs. Most of these were bank Trojans aimed at luring Internet users into following to bogus financial websites where cyber crooks could steal their credentials, says the research branch of Panda Security.

While the popularity of email as a means of spreading malware has declined for cybercriminals they are actively deploying social media-related infections, including Clickjacing attacks on social networks such as Facebook and poisoned search results.

A new scam is roaming on the Internet that tries to make money on blackmailing you over your porn website visits or illegal downloads. The Kenzero Trojan out of Japan is a Trojan of the “ransomware” variety, where a malicious program masquerading as a game registration window takes your personal details then attempts to extort money out of you.