Hackers use 'construction kit' to unleash Trojan variants

Multiple hacker groups are using a "construction kit" supplied by the author of a Trojan horse program discovered last October to develop and unleash more dangerous variants of the original malware.

Already such variants have stolen sensitive information belonging to at least 10,000 individuals and sent the data to rogue servers in China, Russia and the United States, according to Don Jackson, a security researcher at SecureWorks Inc. of Atlanta. The stolen data includes Social Security numbers, online account information, bank account and credit card numbers, user names and passwords and other data that users would usually input during an SSL session.

The Prg Trojan, as it has been dubbed by SecureWorks, is a variant of another Trojan called wnspoem that was unearthed in October. Like its predecessor, the Prg Trojan and its variants, are designed to sniff sensitive data from Windows internal memory buffers before the data is encrypted and sent to SSL-protected Web sites. The Trojans are programmed to send the stolen data to multiple servers around the world where it is stored in encrypted fashion and sold to others looking for such information. An analysis of log files on the servers storing the stolen data shows that a lot of the information is coming from corporate PCs, Jackson said.