Friday, February 10, 2006

Weekly Virus & Trojan Report

In this week's report we look at three new Trojans, Diamin.DU, Banker.CAB and PGPCoder.D.

Diamin.DU is designed to establish phone connections with premium-rate numbers, with potentially serious financial consequences for the affected user. However, it can only affect computers that use a modem to connect to the Internet, as it modifies the dial-up network access settings.

Diamin.DU is easy to recognize, as when it is run, it displays several windows in Italian. As with most Trojans, Diamin.DU does not spread automatically using its own means.

It needs an attacking user's intervention in order to reach the affected computer. The means of transmission used include, among others, floppy disks, CD-ROMs, e-mail messages with attached files, Internet downloads, etc.

Banker.CAB is a Trojan designed to affect users of certain Brazilian banking services. It monitors if the user accesses websites belonging to these banks, in order to obtain passwords.

Then, it sends the data it has gathered to certain email addresses where hackers can collect them and use them fraudulently.

PGPCoder.D is a Trojan that encrypts all the files with a wide range of extensions. The user will not be able to open those files until they are decrypted by a specific application for which they, needless to say, have to pay.

In order to inform users how to buy this application, PGPCoder.D creates texts files in the computer with an email address to contact.

That's it for this week's virus and trojan recap. Let's be careful out there!