'Next Big' Banking Trojan Spotted In Cybercrime Underground

Move over, Zeus and SpyEye: A new commercial banking Trojan is in the works, and it's the first one since the Citadel Trojan was yanked off the commercial malware market last December.

"This is the first actual commercial Trojan we've seen in a while, since Citadel was taken off the market. We haven't seen anything serious enough on the part of malware developers," says Limor Kessem, cybercrime specialist with RSA. "This is the first time something might materialize into a real, commercial banking Trojan" since then, she says.

RSA in February first began hearing hints of a new Trojan toolkit named "KINS," and then recently discovered an announcement of its sale in a closed Russian-speaking underground forum. An advertisement for KINS claims the Trojan was created "from scratch" and not part of another Trojan codebase, but Kessem says that remains to be seen. The kit should become available "soon," she says, so RSA researchers can then study the code and confirm its makeup.

KINS comes with a dropper and DLLs and Zeus-compatible Web injects, according to its creators, and sells for $5,000 in its standard kit form. Additional modules and plug-ins are another $2,000 apiece.

But what stands out most about the kit is that it includes a bootkit, Kessem says. "This guy is planning to bring in a bootkit. That's interesting. It's going to be an interesting way to have the Trojan infect a computer: It's more stealthy when it's a bootkit," she says.

No other commercial Trojan banking malware -- neither Zeus nor SpyEye -- came with a bootkit, she says. The Carberp Trojan creators offered to sell a bootkit for $40,000, but KINS is the first commercial Trojan that comes in bootkit mode, she says.

According to RSA, the commercial Trojan market has been missing a "stable offering" like KINS. "The ongoing turbulence since the leak of the Zeus code in mid-2011 has not given way to a stable offering in the underground, and it seems that professional cybercrime malware developers are just not what they used to be," RSA said in a blog post today on KINS.

Despite claims by KINS' author that the malware is not based on previous Trojans, RSA says the new malware has some obvious similarities with those predecessors, including a main file plus DLL plug-ins, compatibility with Zeus Web injections, the Anti-Rapport plug-in that came with SpyEye, and users in countries formerly with the USSR cannot get infected by KINS, which was a Citadel feature.

"It looks like the next big thing because of a few signs we see," RSA's Kessem says, such as being advertised in the Russian-speaking underground, and the features that are "very Trojan banking-like," she says.

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