Despite the recent arrests of members of the criminal gang responsible for the ZeuS botnet, there are still new malicious programs emerging to support its spread. ZeuS has now become the most common used and best-selling spy program on the online black market due to the ease at which Trojans in the ZeuS family can be configured to steal online data.

 

Virus.Win32.Murofet, detected in early October, generates domain names which are later used to spread the botnet. “This piece of malware demonstrates just how inventive and eager the Zeus developers are to spread their creation around the world,” stated Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky, senior virus analyst at Kaspersky Lab and author of the report.

 

Another trend observed in October is the continuing growth of fake archiving programs. These programs disguise themselves as popular freeware tools to remove license protection from legal software. After a user launches the fake archiving program they are asked to send an SMS to a premium number so they can gain access to the content of whatever the link promised.

 

“There are a variety of hoax scenarios, but the result is always the same,” commented Vyacheslav Zakorzhevsky. “The victim ends up spending money and does not get the file they wanted. This type of fraud is relatively new and only came to light a few months ago. It has attracted a lot of interest from cybercriminals ever since.”