Privacy, Security & Virus Information

Kneber just a Botnet in Zeus Clothing

The news that more than 74,000 computers have just been affected by a very simple but difficult to be rid of Trojan horse going by the title of Kneber has failed to surprise anyone. What may raise a few eyebrows is that Kneber has reportedly succeeded in extracting some fairly sensitive material from large US corporations and government agencies as well as from business and personal computers around the World. More than two thousand organisations, institutions, companies and agencies were infiltrated by the Kneber botnet, over the last 18 months as part of a botnet first spotted by in January. So where was their anti virus protection you may well be asking?

According to industry experts, the Kneber Trojan is nothing more than a resurrection of the Zeus/Zbot toolkits whose existence has been known for some time. What has also become increasingly obvious is that in the hacker's community, it has become increasingly common practice to create a new virus strain, such as is the case with Kneber from the Zeus botnet.

This would tell that virus protection software developers that anyone who has been protected against the more latent dangers to their online security that Zeus presented, they should also be safe-guarded from attacks by its little brother, Kneber. What is causing some concern is that Kneber was also shown to be capable of high-jacking personal security details from the major social networking websites, with Facebook at the helm.

Software security experts have been taken aback by the extent of the damage that Kneber has caused, as they do not regard the trojan horse as a new virus, but just a updated and re-packaged version of the notorious Zeus Trojan. Authorities are convinced that the word Kneber comes from a particular group, bots, being controlled by one hacker, who probably can't believe that he or she got so lucky.

What the emergence and subsequent rapid disappearance of Kneber only goes to show once again that computer owners and operators cannot afford to leave anything to chance. Hackers from all over the World are working flat out to devise new schemes to harvest information. Information that is both private and sensitive and can cause tremendous harm if and when it falls into the wrong hands.

That's why every individual and organisation should take their internet security very seriously.

 

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