Fresh Trojan Carberp Reported To Be Evolving

The Trust Defender's research and development unit Trust Defender Labs is warning that Carberp, a most recent transactional Trojan, is becoming increasingly popular among cyber-criminals who're operating inside USA and Europe.

First observed during May 2010, Carberp is now becoming more-and-more sophisticated and developing rather rapidly, security researchers say. Moreover, this malware poses a severe challenge to Zeus as well as facilitates with a fresh classification of Trojan programs that Internet crooks can use.

Its most recent version incidentally, features majority of the tactics that Zeus utilizes for stealing huge amounts of money out of bank accounts in different parts of the globe. The Trojan attacks the most widely used Web-browsers and operating systems including Mozilla's Firefox and Microsoft's Internet Explorer browsers, and XP, Vista and Windows 7 operating systems of Microsoft.

Furthermore, Carberp tries to hunt and disable or destruct competitor Trojans that steal bank accounts, including Zeus. Nevertheless, it's still unknown if there is any way for eliminating this malicious program.

Meanwhile, it has been revealed that Carberp is capable of compromising the dual-factor validation model that reputed banks employ. For this, it has taken the features of competitor computer Trojans like Spyeye, Gozi and Zeus for inserting HTML overlays.

Besides, the Trojan is further capable of automatically planting on computers despite no administration privileges. So this implies that it can beat all of the strong access controls that Microsoft's most recent OSs possess, along with hijacking browsers in a rare and advanced way to control the entire Internet traffic and simultaneously, Extended Validation SSL-secured HTTPs.

Worryingly, Trust Defender expects Carberp will evolve even more causing threats-personally, politically and financially.

States co-founder as also chief technology officer Andreas Baumhof of Trust Defender, Carberp works differently and being extremely sophisticated, its infection rates may become at par with Zeus. But, the distribution network of Zeus is far larger and therefore Carberp may go unnoticed while employed merely for personalized assaults, he elaborates. ZDNet published this on October 11, 2010.

Additionally, Baumhof cautions that Carberp's infection can proliferate really fast to other countries if the file set-up of the Trojan is slightly modified.

Related article: Fark.com Files Suit against Suspected Hacker from Fox13

» SPAMfighter News - 10/14/2010