Malware


Malicious Ads on Bing Lead to ZeroAccess Trojan

Search-engine poisoning has been the bane of many Internet users’ existence for a long time, and it’s one of many security problems that seems to not be getting any better. In some ways, it may be getting worse, actually. One of the main problems these days is the use of legitimate-looking ads that direct users to malicious sites rather than sites to download applications such as Flash or Firefox.


A new version of the Zeus malware has appeared, and this does not seem to be a minor upgrade, but a major custom version of the Trojan, which now sports a P2P capability that does away with the use of the domain-generation algorithm used in earlier versions and instead uses a hardcoded list of IP addresses to provide infected PCs with new software and config files. This is a throwback to the way the malware used to behave, but it comes with a twist: There no longer is a master URL that infected machines contact to get updates, making it much more difficult to track the Trojan’s activities.