Trojans Made to Steal Financial Information are Becoming One of the Fastest Growing Threats to Internet Users

    According to PandaLabs, StealAll.A is a password stealer type Trojan that steals the information entered by the user in websites containing forms. These web pages can belong to banking entities, email clients, among others. According to the security company, 53.6 percent of the new malware samples that appeared in 2006 were Trojans. And 20 percent of all Trojans detected in 2006 were banker Trojans. The last one,  which were the most frequently detected category of Trojan, is caused by the use of additional security measures by financial institutions, such as the virtual keyboards now used to prevent traditional key-loggers recording user keystrokes.

    Banbra.DCY it's the name of another Trojan designed to take video shots in order to see exactly which characters users enter on the virtual keyboard. The Trojan that was discovered at the end of the last year opens a new door to online fraud by capturing confidential data in video files. When the user connects to certain online banking websites, the Trojan captures a screenshot of the area around the mouse pointer, and saves it to a video file with .avi format. These files are then sent to malicious users -without the target user knowing- in order to use them for all types of online fraud activities. Other keyloggers and Trojans designed to steal this type of data usually capture keystrokes entered by users, saving the data obtained to a text file. However, this forced attackers to make an effort to obtain the data they were looking for (login details, passwords, etc.). Banbra.DCY records actions on video, cyber-crooks can easily identify what information is entered in what section of the form, making these attacks simpler than ever. Due to the new malware dynamic, in which the aim is financial profit, creators of Internet threats try to distribute their creations as discreetly as possible, and are trying to target their attacks, sending their creations to specific users, so that they go unnoticed by security companies.

Another example of new Trojans are those designed for so-called pharming. This involves tampering with the domain name system used to direct users to web pages, sending them to spoof banking or financial pages designed to capture the data entered.

    Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs, warned: "Banker Trojans are currently one of the greatest threats on the internet and attacks using this type of malicious code can have devastating effects on users' finances. These Trojans are created specifically so they can be installed and operate without attracting attention. For this reason users need proactive technologies to detect new threats by analysing their behaviour."