Zeus is the "biggest banking Trojan out there," Laura Mather, co-founder and vice president of marketing at Palo Alto, Calif.-based fraud prevention company Silver Tail Systems said during a recent company webcast. "It's the nastiest, most sophisticated Trojan I've ever seen. It's a money-stealing machine."



FYI:  How could it be that Clampi is the "big one" after reading what we both just read about Zeus.  Is is "greek" to you as well?  



The Zeus Trojan has a capability that allows criminals to add fields to the form, such as fields for additional authentication information for a bank website; those credentials are sent back to the criminal, she said. Fraudsters also can alter the display to fool users into thinking all their money is still in their account.



The way Zeus alters a form on a genuine bank website as it's displayed on the victim's computer -- instead of showing an entirely fake banking website -- is one of its most powerful features and sets it apart from other banking Trojans, said Richard Wang, manager of the U.S. research labs at Sophos Plc.



One new Zeus Trojan functionality allows criminals to quickly use stolen credentials, and in some cases, circumvent two-factor authentication. In studying several Zeus variants, researchers at RSA, the security division of Hopkinton, Mass.-based EMC, recently discovered that some criminals were using the Jabber instant messaging open protocol in order to receive stolen information as soon as it was collected from infected computers.



Editor's Translation:  One Time Passwords (OTP's) are received by the bad guys at the same time they are received for the intended recipient, thus OTP's are no longer secure...



"Real-time notification can further online criminals' goals in some cases when certain variations of man-in-the-middle (MITM) or man-in-the-browser (MITB) attacks are launched," RSA researchers wrote. "With such attacks, the online criminal may be acting in real-time as their intended victim logs in to his or her account."



Read the Article in it's Entirety at Search Financial Security.com