The latest news from Kaspersky Lab is a bit of a shocker, particularly for those who rely on and take advantage of online banking.

 

According to the online security company, no fewer than 780 new malicious programs, which are intended to steal users’ online banking data, are detected daily.

The company elaborated that over the last three months, ‘Trojan bankers’ have been detected on an average of 2000 unique users’ computers every day.

 

It cites one of the most notable Trojans discovered last month, called Trojan Banker.MSIL.MultiPhishing.gen, which was designed to steal account details from clients of numerous banks in the UK, including Santander, HSBC Bank UK, Metro Bank, Bank of Scotland, Lloyds TSB, and Barclays.

 

 

The company elaborated that after launching, the Trojan would wait for an online banking service to start running. It would then open a window that imitates an authorisation form for the respective bank. Interestingly, the Trojan allows no mistakes, and checks the accuracy of the data that is entered.

 

The result is that fraudsters end up obtaining confidential information that gives them full access to the victim’s bank account.

 

While Kaspersky pointed out that this particular Trojan primarily targets users from the UK, it stressed that Trojan bankers can have global impact. The company revealed that Brazil tops the list of countries most frequently targeted (16.9% of detections), followed by Russia (15.8%) and China (10.8%).

 

For South African users, and those who rely on the internet worldwide, that is not the most disturbing part of the story. Instead, it provides a scale for how large and prolific a problem malware appears to be, particularly when considering that just one Trojan banker can apparently have widespread impact, and 780 are apparently being discovered on a daily basis.

 

However, according to Kaspersky, even that number accounts for a mere 1.1% of the total number of malware detected every day by the company.

 

This highlights the seemingly inexorable and compounding problem that malware presents; a tidal wave of attempts to corrupt if not outright steal data and sensitive information.

In recent news, Google unleashed its new Bouncer service on malware plaguing Android apps, and Kaspersky warned about the main threats it expected to see in the year ahead.