Kneber say never

The Zeus malware has been featured in the media lately and I thought I'd talk about it here. The news rage last week started with a security company announcing that they had found a big botnet out there with about 74,000 people infected. These guys dubbed the botnet "kneber" because the domain names involved in this case mentioned a Hillary Kneber. From there, all marketing departments in all security companies went crazy asking "Do we know anything about this new Kneber botnet??".

So digging a bit deeper into the mysterious new botnet that appeared from thin air, it turns out that this is nothing more than our old friend Zeus. This led to a whole new wave of people discussing whether this was important or not and how.

In any case, Zeus is a do-it-yourself malware kit. You can purchase the software, configure your bots and spread them around so you can grow your own botnet with information-stealing capabilities perfectly targeted to your audience (ehm... victims). Obviously the criminals behind the Kneber botnet followed those instructions and managed to get 74,000 people infected. Actually, there's lots of other malware toolkits for sale out there from shady companies that often include tech support and antivirus detection protection among other services.

So this is the world we live in today, one where anybody can make profit in the internet by stealing other people's money. It's as easy as buying a malware kit and building your own botnet. At any moment there are hundreds of different "Zeus" botnets commanded by different criminal groups. Some of them are much bigger than 74,000 PCs and there's really no need to report each one of them as news because they are not. Nevertheless, if this served to raise awareness about Zeus and about how cybercriminals carry out their internet business, maybe something good came out of it.