UK cops arrest two in Zbot Trojan case
Thursday, November 19, 2009
The British Metropolitan Police took two suspected cyber criminals into custody earlier this month in connection with an investigation into the Zbot banking Trojan.
Zbot, which is also known as Zeus, is a highly sophisticated piece of malicious software, according to experts. The Trojan, which is difficult to detect with conventional anti-virus software, is capable of recording and retransmitting a wide array of personal information back to a central server, including online banking and social networking data.
Zbot can also form infected machines into a botnet, which can then be used to perform a number of malicious online actions like spam campaigns and denial-of-service attacks. Signature-based virus detection is frequently useless against the Trojan, since it can take on numerous forms.
The Guardian newspaper says that the suspects, one male and one female, are both 20 years old. They were arrested in Manchester, and are currently free on bail while the investigation continues. Police told UK media outlets that the two used Zbot to steal "millions of lines of data" from affected computers.
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