New banking Trojan steals money and covers its tracks
Thursday, October 1, 2009
URLzone, a Trojan detected earlier this month infecting a swath of computers in Germany, may be one of the gravest threats to online bank data security yet, according to experts.
The highly sophisticated malicious program infects computers in the usual way: email attachments, malicious Javascript, and Adobe PDF vulnerabilities. URLzone, which only affects Windows computers, exploits a browser security hole in Firefox, Opera, and the last three versions of Internet Explorer.
URLzone, once installed on a target machine, becomes active when the user logs on to a bank website and hijacks the web browser in use, transferring money out of the victim's account without his or her notice.
What makes URLzone particularly pernicious, experts say, is the lengths to which it goes to avoid detection. The Trojan carefully calculates the amount of money stolen from a given account so as to avoid tripping anti-fraud alerts. It even falsifies the transaction information displayed to the victim, so that the theft will appear not to have happened unless the account is accessed from a computer uninfected by URLzone.
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