October 01, 2009
Important: Read this article if you use Windows to do your on-line banking!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10363836-83.html?tag=nl.e757
Some real smart guys at Finjan, an internet security company have discovered at least in part a new Trojan horse program that does more than steal your user log-in information. Apparently this little bug also takes money out of your account for as long as you are logged in to your bank, and it also has the ability to display a fake balance while taking all your hard-earned cash.
The program is very sophisticated, as it can calculate just how much money to steal from a particular account based on the balance, and it can do this while you are looking at your balance, or just have the page up and perhaps stood up to get a drink, etc. It keeps you logged in, without letting the page expire.
This is a new generation of banking Trojan, according to Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer at Finjan. He states the software can exploit holes in Firefox, Internet Explorer 6 to the current version 8, and also Opera web browsers. It only runs on Microsoft Windows systems, but one can be infected by various methods such as malicious JavaScript, even an Adobe PDF file can carry the payload to infect your machine.
Roughly 90,000 computers have visited sites housing the malware, out of these, over 6000 of them have been infected. A few hundred of the infected computers have had money stolen from bank accounts.
Be careful, as this may be just the beginning of this type of Trojan. Just because this is the only one discovered does not mean that there are not other variants affecting many more computers. Keep a close watch on your bank balance, and do not leave your browser open longer than needed while conducting any online banking activites.
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