According to The Guardian, UK, a Russian gang has stolen more than 1 million Euros from individual bank accounts in France, using 'sleeper bugs' to infect user computers. Using the virus, the intruder can take charge and empty a bank account in a matter of seconds.
"The financial motives of virus is nothing new. While it's vital to have an anti-virus solution to safeguard your personal information, one needs to also make sure that the software is up-to-date, in threat detection and prevention," says Sulabh Mahant, security analyst, MicroWorld.
This virus spreads via e-mails and can remain dormant in the computer. It activates when the victim connects to the online bank account and the virus steals usernames and passwords and forwards them to the thieves.
Then, they pass customer's savings to the accounts of third parties, known as mules, who work as conduits for money transfer in return of a dividend, up to 10 per cent. The syndicate used a fictitious American firm named 'World Transfer' for these operations.
Russian hackers behind the scam, mostly in their twenties and several Ukrainians who controlled them, have been arrested in Moscow and St Petersburg.
According to the authorities all the French victims were trapped because they didn't have any proactive anti-virus software.
"Our solutions eScan and MailScan use a combination of signature and heuristic scanning to defeat existing viruses as well as disguised or newer malice. Many new viruses are mutant variants of earlier ones, and we employ a sophisticated algorithm to catch them," Mahant points out.
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