New variant of banking trojan emerges in Kazakhstan

ASTANA. KAZINFORM A new variant of the Zeus banking trojan, Neutrino has emerged in Kazakhstan, Russia, Algeria, Ukraine, and Egypt. Neutrino is custom-made to collect credit card information from point-of-sale systems, Kaspersky Lab experts said.

Kaspersky found that the largest areas of infection are Russia and Kazakhstan-and nearly 10% of infected computers belong to small business corporate customers.

According to Kaspersky specialists, recently a quarter of all Neutrino attacks occurred in Russia and a tenth of them target small businesses.

Analysts and researchers point out that new versions of known malware are becoming more complex, their functionality is expanding, and "appetites" are growing and despite belonging to an old, well-known and researched family, different variants of Zeus are bringing them various surprises in the form of atypical functionality or application.

Earlier, on July 6, Group-IB, an international company specializing in prevention and investigation of IT-crimes, reported the emergence of a new "invisible" virus through which hackers can steal money from credit cards via MMS. Existing antiviruses do not yet define this virus as "malicious software", the company says.

The virus also, according to cyber investigators, without the user's knowledge, requests a balance from SMS-banking of the infected phone and transfers money to hackers' accounts.

In late June, computer systems from around the world were attacked by notorious Petya ransomware.