Friday, August 26, 2005

ID theft ring escapes shut down

Via the BBC.

An ID theft ring that has hit thousands of people is proving hard to shut down.

Discovered by US security fim Sunbelt Software, the scam used keyloggers to steal data stored by Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser.

Variants of the original bug are popping up and sending data to other servers and are continuing to harvest data from unwitting victims' machines.

Tools are now appearing to help people find out if they are infected and to remove the sophisticated bug.

Sunbelt came across the server at the centre of the ID theft ring by accident while investigating the ways that spyware can infect Windows PCs.

A search of the server revealed log files containing megabytes of data stolen from PC users by a variant of a well-known virus. Sunbelt estimates that up to 30,000 people were caught out by the keylogging bug since it appeared in late July.

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