Zeus Trojan is just one of many daily attacks, says Santander boss

Nicola Brittain, Computing, Friday 23 April 2010 at 16:43:00

The bank offers free software to customers to combat attacks of this sort

A head of security at Santander has said the new version of the Zeus Trojan,
Zeus 1.4, is just "one of a number of 'significant' daily attacks the bank faces
".

The new Trojan, which was exposed earlier this week, exploits the Firefox
browser to carry out fraud against online banking users.

Zeus 1.4 supports T-logger, where it logs T strokes, and transaction
tampering, in which it recognises a banking session and puts fake pages in front
of the user.

The malware was discovered by security company Trusteer, which has detected
it in one in every 3,000 computers it monitors.

Santander?s Head of Information Security & Business Resilience, Michael
Paisley, said: ?We go out of our way to protect our customers from fraud of this
sort.

"In fact, we began offering Trusteer?s Rapport anti-virus software to
customers as a free download in December. We are not the only bank that does
this, and the cost of offering the software is of course far less than the cost
of dealing with fraud on a large scale.?

He continued: ?We dealt with this [Zeus] Trojan much as we deal with every
threat and it is just one of a number of significant daily attacks we face.

"We analysed how the Trojan might attack our various different internet
channels, Santander, Alliance and Leicester, Cahoot and others, then worked out
whether we could manage it by simply changing our processes, or whether we need
to adopt a new technology. In this case we have tweaked several online
processes, and these are backed up by the Trusteer software.?

Paisley explained that cybercrime is no longer the province of small scale
hackers, but organised crime: ?We have discovered Trojans that are set to
destroy other Trojans, where one powerful criminal gang is looking to limit the
effectiveness of another.

"This crime is really pervasive too." he added. ?We recently ID?d a Trojan
that scans Facebook ? most people use the same password for all their
applications, so if a virus scans your Facebook password it may be able to
access your internet banking or other applications.?

Full story at http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2261945/trojan-santander