Arrests Made for ZBot / Zeus Trojan


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11/19/2009



Arrests Made for ZBot / Zeus Trojan

Kevin R. Smith
Co-Editor


Police in Manchester, England, arrested two people in connection with the Zbot Trojans.

If you're unfamiliar with the ZBot Trojan, also called "Zeus," it's a nasty bugger that was responsible for over $415,000 being stolen from a Kentucky county's bank account earlier in 2009.

But that's not all it's known for.

Zbot/Zeus is, according to mention in a Sophos security blog is,

"...one of the most notorious pieces of malware of recent times.

"It's a data-stealing Trojan horse, designed to grab information from Internet users which would help hackers break into online bank accounts and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace."

That's just the start of it. Zbot also gets/got spammed to average people using the Internet using a variety of social engineering tricks to try to trick the unwary into opening an attachment or clicking on a link to a website hosting malware.

So, assuming the right folks were arrested, this could be rather good news. Let's hope that they did get the right folks, and let's hope also that even though they're out on bail already, they soon face the appropriate amount of justice--especially given how many people, companies, governments, and other organizations were harmed by their Trojan malware.

And, to the cops responsible for the arrest, again assuming they caught the right folks, "Well done."

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