I Spy with My Little Eye….
…70 GB of stolen data behind a new botnet that has caught researchers’ full attention. Security researchers have managed to infliltrate, through the Torpig botnet, one of the well known zombie networks in the virtual world. According to their findings, this impressive amount of data was stolen in only 10 days.
As the Register reports, Torpig bots manage to steal more than 8,300 credentials corresponding to 410 different financial institutions. The research team from the University of California at Santa Barbara, over 21% of the accounts belonged to PayPal users. Almost 298,000 unique credentials were intercepted from more than 52,000 infected machines.
How could this happen so fast? It’s all due to the “unusually large haul is Torpig’s ability to siphon credentials from a large number of computer programs”.
After wrapping its tentacles around Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook, Skype, ICQ, and 26 other applications, Torpig constantly monitors every keystroke entered into them. Every 20 minutes, the malware automatically uploads new data to servers controlled by the authors. Because the software runs at such a low level, it is able to intercept passwords before they may be encrypted by secure sockets layer or other programs.
Definitely scary!
