New, Advanced Banking Trojan Discovered In The Wild

A new, advanced banking Trojan is infecting users in Turkey, the Czech Republic, Portugal, and the United Kingdom, according to researchers at ESET.

In a blog posted on Wednesday, the researchers warned of a Trojan called Win32/Spy.Hesperbot, which does keystroke logging and sets up a remote proxy on the end user's machine. Hesperbot also does some advanced tricks, such as creating a hidden virtual network computing (VNC) server on the end user's machine, ESET says.

The Trojan uses a very credible-looking, phishing-like campaign that appears to come from trustworthy organizations to lure its victims, ESET says. "The aim of the attackers is to obtain login credentials giving access to the victim's bank account and to get them to install a mobile component of the malware on their Symbian, Blackberry or Android phone," the blog says.

So far, the Trojan hasn't spread too far. ESET estimates that it has infected several hundred users' computers in Turkey, and even fewer in the Czech Republic, Portugal, and the United Kingdom. It tries to trick users into loading the malware by sending emails that appear to be tracking information from the local postal service, the blog states.

"In the course of our research, we also stumbled upon an additional component used by Win32/Spy.Hesperbot," the blog says. "This malware, detected by ESET as Win32/Spy.Agent.OEC, harvests e-mail addresses from the infected system and sends them to a remote server. It is possible that these collected addresses were also targeted by the malware-spreading campaigns."

The attack is new and may not yet be recognized by all antivirus systems.

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