16 Sep 2004
Trojan horse targets Australian online banking customers, Sophos reports
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| The IBank-A Trojan horse attempts to fool
Australian surfers into entering their bank login details. |
Experts at Sophos have warned computer users about a Trojan
horse that helps hackers break into the bank accounts of customers
of an Australian bank.
The Troj/IBank-A Trojan horse
is designed to steal information from internet customers of the
National Australia Bank, which could allow hackers to break into
accounts and steal substantial amounts of money.
"Once the Trojan has installed itself on a computer it lurks in
the background waiting for the right moment to pounce. As soon as
it sees the user is logging onto the National Australia Bank's
website it grabs their account id and password and sends it to
remote hackers," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant
for Sophos. "More and more virus writers, phishers and hackers are
focusing their attention on internet banking customers - users who
do not take care may be risking having their accounts emptied by
these criminals."
Although this particular Trojan horses only targets users of an
Australian bank, Sophos warns that others have been seen which
affect banking customers in other parts of the world. Recent Trojan
horses have attempted to defraud online bank users in Brazil and the United Kingdom.
"At the moment we have not had a significant number of sightings
of this particular Trojan horse, but all computer users should be
running an up-to-date anti-virus as well as protecting their PC
with firewall technology. This, combined with the safe computing
practice of exercising caution over what you choose to run on your
computer, can dramatically reduce the risks of these kind of
attacks," continued Cluley.
About Sophos
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, and network access control solutions backed by SophosLabs - a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.
Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.