Zeus Trojan in fake IRS email scam
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
The advanced Zeus Trojan is the payload of a malicious spam campaign that experts are calling the biggest in the world.
The Trojan, which was detected in recent tests by just five of 41 commercial virus scanners, is delivered via an email that purports to be from the IRS. The message informs victims that their input is required to clear up some tax irregularity, but the proffered link sends users to a malicious web page that installs the Trojan.
Zeus can then ransack infected computers for financial information which can be used to empty bank accounts. Some estimates place the financial losses from the Zeus Trojan at over $1 million a day.
Gary Warner, director of research in computer forensics at the University of Alabama - Birmingham, says that this is the fourth confirmed malicious spam campaign that attempts to spread the Zeus Trojan to hit the internet in recent months. While other forms of cybercrime, like malvertising, have been garnering most of the recent headlines, experts say that malicious spam is still a grave danger to internet users.
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