Our Bureau

Coimbatore , July 20

WEBSENSE Security Labs has, in the last fortnight, registered a steep rise in Trojan horse downloaders and banking Trojan horses. (Trojan horse is a malicious program that is disguised as legitimate software).

The security lab has detected over 1,000 malicious Web sites and discovered 100 unique Trojan horses in the last two weeks.

According to Websense, the malicious code is hosted on malicious Web sites and uses deception techniques through e-mail and instant messaging to attract users to visit the sites and run it. The Web sites host either a Trojan horse downloader (which, when run, downloads a banking Trojan horse) or the actual key logging code itself.

The code monitors the behaviour of end-users to determine if they are accessing banking and e-commerce Web sites.

When end-users access these sites, the malicious code monitors are invoked. The keystrokes are captured and sent through HTTP, SMTP, and sometimes encrypted through SSL. The most common deception techniques used are said to be music-related dedication e-mails and greeting cards.

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