It's a common practice in bank security IT circles to assume that PCs have already been infected with malware, then move on to to protecting the actual transactions. According to new research, that assumption is sound.
Security firm Trusteer says that 72.6 percent of the 1.6 million desktops that Trusteer Rapport disinfected in the past 12 months were previously infected with various strains of Zeus and SpyEye, which are considered the most dangerous strains of financial malware. The firm also removed more than 4,300 severe malware infections a day.
What's made the problem particularly dangerous is the free availability of Zeus. Since the god of malware was made freely available last year, its distribution has almost doubled.
The malware poses a security problem because once it's installed on a PC, it can locate vulnerabilities through which sensitive data can be mined for ID theft and other digital crime.
These strains are also hard to detect. According to SpyEye Tracker, the average SpyeEye binary antivirus detection rate is 26.77 percent. According to Zeus Tracker, the average Zeus binary antivirus detection rate is 39.18 percent.
