Trojan lurks, waiting to steal admin passwords
Writers of a password-stealing Trojan horse program have found that a little patience can lead to a lot of infections.
They have managed to infect hundreds of thousands of computers, including more than 14,000 within one unnamed global hotel chain, by waiting for system administrators to log onto infected PCs and then using a Microsoft administration tool to spread their malicious software throughout the network.
The criminals behind the Coreflood Trojan are using the software to steal banking and brokerage account usernames and passwords. They've amassed a 50GB database of this information from the machines they've infected, according to Joe Stewart, director of malware research at security vendor SecureWorks Inc.
