“Hold onto your hats. A new version of the Zeus trojan, called Zeus3, has wreaked havoc on thousands of bank accounts worldwide, stealing just over $1 million,” Nicholas Deleon reports for CrunchGear.
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“The best part? There’s pretty much no way to detect the trojan if it’s on your system,” Deleon reports. “Hooray for humanity, right?”
“The trojan first popped up last month, and has drained more than 3,000 bank accounts,” Deleon reports. “M86 Security, the first group to discover the trojan, says: We’ve never seen such a sophisticated and dangerous threat. Always check your balance and have a good idea of what it is. …The scariest part is that the trojan, after clear out your bank account, serves up a fake bank statement page. It looks like you have all of your money, but you actually have $50 left in your entire account.”
Deleon reports, “Oh, it only affects Windows systems. But you knew that already.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hey, good thing you “saved” upfront when you bought that shiteous Windows laptop instead of that MacBook Pro you really wanted, Lauren. Surely, the hacker thieves thank you for the extra cash, you computer shopping genius.
MacDailyNews Note: A separate report from Computerworld NZ states that “the botnet included a few hundred thousand PCs and even about 3,000 Apple Macs.” It does not state whether these zombie Macs were running Windows (although one might suspect that to be the case). Regardless, participation in the botnet does not mean that the Mac users’ bank accounts were drained; it means that the Macs helped the thieves drain the bank accounts. If you have to run Windows on your Mac, do not use it to connect to the Internet unless you have to and never use Windows for your online banking. As always: Do not authorize software installs from untrusted sources.
Funny I have always been told that you never use a Windows machine to do online banking. I was told to use a live CD to boot or to use a machine that that is never used except for that online banking task and other wise never hooked up to the net or use a Mac.
New slogan.. save now, pay later!
Macs unaffected … I love it!
Wow look at you MDN. Act like a overly expensive MacBook pro will never have a virus. Even better why get anti-virus since MacBook is never going to get a virus. Or maybe is it just because Microsoft is everywhere hackers love to target the big man but make no mistake Apple you will be next and your super Expensive laptops, desktops will have no excuse when you get invaded by a Trojan and or worm. So atop acting like your s$&t don’t stink
I’m a trojan horse writer and Windows 7 was my idea.
Funny how these idiots never mention this is a PEEECEEE problem.
If you access your bank account from your windows pc, you deserve to robbed, since you have proven to not posess the basic IQ to be let loose on society.
@Jacob456 – We have heard that argument for the past 20 years at least. We are well prepared and educated to know that nothing is virus proof. We are also waiting for that day when a self perpetuating worm or virus attacks macs. So far that hasn’t happened so shut up until then, keep using to windows so that you can get your bank account remotely drained while we enjoy security.
On days like today, smug is good.
It’s funny that, “But you knew that already,” is from the original article, not part of the MDM take.
Jacob456.
Have u ever used an “Apple” Product, i Guess not.
@Jacob456,
Cut back on the crack for breakfast.
@Jacob456-
Viruses can hide in the spaghetti code of Windows. They can’t in Unix. Every program that runs in Unix has to run out of a library, and there are a limited number of them. Hence, it’s not only harder to get a virus to run on a Mac, since all programs have to have admin approval to load, but it’s easier to find and eradicate them, too.
Yeah, we’ve been hearing about our virus-infested future for years now. Still waiting. Still running computers with no AV software expenses. Not trying to be smug, just telling you how it is.
Once again, Jacob456 proves that windows trolls have no grasp of basic grammer or reasoning.
Come talk to us when that imminent Mac virus actually appears, jacob. Until then, thanks for playing!
LOL
@ Radius
grammar
When do you think someone will send the FED a tax retrieval trojan that is designed to return paid taxes to the bank accounts that the government took them from?
Is there a patriot hacker on the web?
Undetectable. Sweet Jesus.
No process should ever, ever, EVER be able to run undetectably. How shitty and poorly made does an operating system have to be for that to even happen? How absolutely lacking in security?
…Oh right. About as much as Windows.
The hilarious part about this is that IT Cultists going to keep chanting their mantra that Windows is the most safetest OS evar. Yeah, don’t let a little thing like reality get in your way, guys.
No, no, I shouldn’t make fun of Windows, though. Everybody knows OS X is going to get utterly destroyed by a flood of malware any day now. I mean, that’s what Microsoft flacks have been saying for 10 years now, right? So it has to be true…
This is an example of when a Mac CAN be effected and is no safer than windows. The difference here is that there are more idiot computer users out there then there are idiot Mac users. If you click this trojan horse download, you’re just as at risk as the PC user that accepted the download. Just think before you click!
The Crunchgear article sucks. Go directly to this
http://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/view/11623/major-uk-banks-online-customers-hit-by-600-000plus-zeus-3-fraud-/
The people who question the lack of antivirus software on our Macs never understand that until there is something to look for, other than the rare Trojan Horse, antivirus software for Mac is just a waste of money and CPU cycles.
Something funny! On the page
For this story. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1302062/New-trojan-virus-Zeus-v3-empties-online-bank-accounts.html. You will see an ad for Internet Explorer.
Uh, what?
This is an example of Macs being safer than Windows, because while it is possible to make a trojan for OS X, it isn’t possible to make an undetectable trojan for it. Windows indiscriminately allows things to bury themselves deep inside the system, OS X allows nothing whatsoever to. Not even kernel extensions.
at least pc’s come in lots of pretty colours
Professionally and for personal use, have used Apple and (reluctantly) Wintel solutions since they originally came to market.
During this lengthy timeframe, there has been one instance of malware on my Mac. It was an infected MS-Word file passed by a professional peer from their Windows platform.
I multi-boot between Mac OS X, Ubuntu 10.04, and Windows XP. In that declining order of preference. Firewalls are running on all 3.
Which is why I never – NEVER – use a Windows machine for internet banking.
the only time i found a virus on a mac was back in 1994 via disinfectant on an old quadra , a cd on a magazine had one inside a quicktime file
didn’t affect me then , hasn’t affected me since