Zues Botnet & Its Sophistication

The Zues trojan has been around for quite some time. Enough time that some people have even dedicated entire websites to tracking Zues Botnets (According to the Zues Tracker, even a host on my hosting company is, or was at one time, part of the Zues Botnet!!). It’s primary target is stealing bank account information and it has been utilized successfully to steal a lot of money!

It’s said to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, Botnets on the Internet according to Wikipedia.

Zues is a very sophisticated piece of malware. Instead of the standard central IRC based “command & control” — it utilizes a P2P web based command center which completely eliminates centralized shutdown. It also comes equipped with sophisticated updating abilities and spreads through multiple vectors, including Facebook and LinkedIn.

Even more so interesting, the bot writers built in functionality to kill your operating system. Seems like a smart idea if you want to self destruct your botnet!

If you’re interested there’s tons of info on the Zues botnet online; just do a quick search.

Update:

Excellent post from McAfee Labs on Zeus Crimeware Toolkit showing that it even comes with a graphical interface for configuring and building the malware!