Almost all Fortune 500 companies show Zeus botnet activity
Up to 88% of Fortune 500 companies may have been affected by the Zeus trojan, according to research by RSA's FraudAction Anti-Trojan division, part of EMC. The trojan installs keystroke loggers to steal login credentials to banking, social networking, and e-mail accounts.
The botnet was first identified in 2007 and is still around today. The malware tends to be difficult to detect and remove, and several million machines worldwide are believed to be infected. The Zeus server-side components, used to collect the stolen data, surprisingly mimic techniques more commonly seen in the world of commercial software; the software is licensed (with fees ranging from several hundred to a few thousand dollars), and each installation is tied to the hardware it's installed on in a system reminiscent of Microsoft's software activation. The malware itself predominantly attacks Windows XP machines, though Windows Vista and Windows 7 variants are available for sale too.
