Massive Spyware ID theft ring discovered

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Massive Spyware ID theft ring discovered

Written by Editor

Tuesday, 09 August 2005 19:38

It seems that the guys over at Sunbelt Software have uncovered a large ID theft ring using something that may have been installed as part of the CoolWebSearch spyware. The story it appears is quite a long one, but the short version is Patrick Jordan, on of Sunbelt’s most senior CoolWebSearch (CWS) experts, was doing research on a CWS exploit. During the course of infecting the machine he discovered that the machine became a ‘spam zombie’ and that the machine made a call back to a remote server. After tracing the the remote server and found an incredibly sophisticated criminal identity theft ring.

Now Sunbelt are still trying to ascertain whether or not this is directly related to CWS. It seems there are thousands of machines contacting this server daily, there is a key logger file that grows and grows on the remote site, and then is zipped off and then the cycle continues again. The who scam seems very sophisticated and Sunbelt have contacted the FBI, who are looking into the situation.

Sunbelt have more details in there blog here and Suzi Turner at Spywarewarrior has more here too.

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