Fergie's Tech Blog

New BlackEnergy Trojan Targeting Russian, Ukrainian Banks

Kelly Jackson Higgins writes on Dark Reading:

Russian hackers have written a more sophisticated version of the infamous BlackEnergy Trojan associated with the 2008 cyberattacks against Georgia that now targets Russian and Ukrainian online banking customers.

Joe Stewart, a security researcher with SecureWorks, says Russian hackers are using the Trojan spread via the BlackEnergy botnet to hit Russian and Ukrainian banks with a two-pronged attack that steals their customers' online banking credentials and then wages a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the banks as a cover: "They may be emptying the bank accounts while the banks are busy cleaning up from the DDoS," Stewart says.

Dubbed by Stewart as "BlackEnergy 2," this new version of the Trojan is a full rewrite of the code that features a modular architecture that supports plug-ins that can be written without access to its source code. It currently comes with three different DDoS plug-ins, as well as one for spamming and two for online banking fraud, according to Stewart.

posted by Fergie @ 3/04/2010 01:55:00 PM