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In-depth look at SpyEye crimeware


Brian Krebs has an in-depth look at SpyEye, a “crimeware” trojan horse that is used to harvest personal information (especially banking credentials) from infected Windows machines. SpyEye’s keylogger is capable of prioritizing the information it grabs by paying special attention to information from browser forms, including Chrome and Opera.

Trojans like ZeuS and SpyEye have the built-in ability to keep logs of every keystroke a victim types on his or her keyboard, but this kind of tracking usually creates too much extraneous data for the attackers, who mainly are interested in financial information such as credit card numbers and online banking credentials. Form grabbers accomplish this by stripping out any data that victims enter in specific Web site form fields, snarfing and recording that data before it can be encrypted and sent to the Web site requesting the information.

Both SpyEye and ZeuS have had the capability to do form grabbing against Internet Explorer and Firefox for some time, but this is the first time I’ve seen any major banking trojans claim the ability to target Chrome and Opera users with this feature.

SpyEye Targets Opera, Google Chrome Users

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