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74K PCs in 2.5K firms infected by Zeus Trojan
Thursday, 18 February 2010, 19:26 IST   |    2 Comments
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74K PCs in 2.5K firms infected by Zeus Trojan
Bangalore: Over the past one and half year, more than 74,000 PCs at nearly 2,500 organizations around the globe are infected by Zeus Trojan, which is designed to steal login credentials to bank sites, social networks, and e-mail systems. The systems were infected with the Zeus Trojan and the botnet was dubbed "Kneber" after a username that linked the infected PCs on corporate and government systems, according to NetWitness, reports CNET. The Wall Street Journal reported that Merck, Cardinal Health, Paramount Pictures, and Juniper Networks were among the targets in the attack. NetWitness speculated that criminals in Eastern Europe using a command-and-control server in Germany sent attachments containing the malware in e-mails or links to the malware on Web sites that employees within the companies clicked on. NetWitness further revealed shocking information that they have discovered more than 75 gigabytes worth of stolen data during routine analytic tasks as part of an evaluation of a client network on January 26. The cache of stolen data included 68,000 corporate login credentials, access to e-mail systems, online banking sites, Facebook, Yahoo, Hotmail, 2,000 SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate files and data on individuals, NetWitness said in a statement and in a whitepaper available for download from its Web site. In addition to stealing specific data, Zeus can be used to search for and steal any file on the computer, download and execute programs and allow someone to remotely control the computer. More than half of the compromised machines were also infected with peer-to-peer bot malware called Waledac, the company said. Nearly 200 countries were affected, with most of the infections found in Egypt, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United States. "While Operation Aurora shed light on advanced threats from sponsored adversaries, the number of compromised companies and organizations pales in comparison to this single botnet," said Amit Yoran, Chief Executive of NetWitness and former Director of the National Cyber Security Division. "These large-scale compromises of enterprise networks have reached epidemic levels."

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