Trojan steals money from your bank site

Researchers at security firm Finjan have discovered details of a new type of banking Trojan horse that doesn't just steal your bank log in credentials but actually steals money from your account while you are logged in and displays a fake balance.

The bank Trojan, dubbed URLzone, has features designed to thwart fraud detection systems which are triggered by unusual transactions, Yuval Ben-Itzhak, chief technology officer at Finjan, said in an interview on Tuesday. For instance, the software is programmed to calculate on-the-fly how much money to steal from an account based on how much money is available.

The specific Trojan Finjan researchers analyzed targets customers of unnamed German banks. It was linked back to a command-and-control server in Ukraine that was used to send instructions to the trojan software sitting infected PCs. Finjan has notified German law enforcement authorities, Ben-Itzhak said.

"It's a next generation bank trojan," he said. "This is part of a new trend of more sophisticated Trojans designed to evade antifraud systems."

Finjan researchers were able to trace the communications from the code on an infected machine back to the command-and-control server, which was left unsecured, according to Ben-Itzhak. On that server, they saw the LuckySploit administration console and were able to see exactly what types of rules the Trojan was written to follow and statistics on victims.

About 90,000 computers visited the sites housing the malware and 6,400 of them were infected, a 7.5 percent success rate, he said. Of those whose computers had the Trojan installed, a few hundred had money stolen from their bank accounts, he added.

During the span of 22 days in mid-August, the criminals behind the Trojan stole the euro equivalent of nearly $438,000, according to the security company.


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