DUBLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Research and Markets has announced the addition of the "Case Study: The Underground Economy of the Zeus Banking Trojan Horse" report to their offering.

The banking Trojan horse ZeuS is one of todays biggest threats towards online banking. Being used to attack both companies and private individuals, this malware undergoes frequent mutations which demonstrate how technically innovative its author is.

Thanks to its technical nature and great flexibility, over the years ZeuS malware has become a major and long-term threat. First identified by researchers in 2006, this malware is a Trojan horse specialized in stealing banking credentials which directly attacks its victims web browser. The malware is also equipped with numerous high tech functions, including customer certificate theft, transparent redirection, on-the-fly rewriting of HTML pages and requested transactions, real-time notification of hackers, and complete take over of the infected machine. Identified in 2007 under the name of UpLevel, the author of ZeuS has surrounded itself with a close inner circle that is responsible for selling the malware. Numerous public versions are available at low prices or even free of charge. As these versions generally contain backdoors, they are reserved for amateur fraudsters, while private versions of ZeuS are sold for several thousands of dollars.

One group, included among the top ZeuS customers, operates a botnet comprising several tens of thousands of computers, specialized in stealing money via the ACH network in the United States.

The publisher's recommendation to banks is to adopt, if they haven't already done so, an authentication mechanism for online banking that is entirely multi-channel, meaning that no convergence point between the two channels exists. The web browsers used by banking customers must be considered first and foremost as a threat for online banking, and not merely as an opportunity to introduce new online services.

1 Introduction

2 An Expertise in Bank Data Theft

3 The Authors Multiple Faces

4 The Prevalence of ZeuS Infections

5 Analysis of ZeuS users

6 Analysis of ZeuS Targets

7 Risks Analysis

8 Recommendations

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/685fb7/case_study_the_un