SpyEye Poses Risk To Banking Defenses

Financial institutions are facing more trouble from SpyEye, a piece of malicious software that steals money from customers online bank accounts, according to new research from security vendor Trusteer.

SpyEye is a dastardly piece of malicious software: it can harvest credentials for online accounts and also initiate transactions as a person is logged into their account, literally making it possible to watch their bank balance drop by the second.

In its latest versions, SpyEye has been modified with new code designed to evade advanced systems banks have put in place to try and block fraudulent transactions, said Mickey Boodai, Trusteer’s CEO.

Banks are now analyzing how a person uses their site, looking at parameters such as how many pages a person looks at on the site, the amount of time a person spends on a page and the time it takes a person to execute a transaction. Other indicators include IP address, such as if a person who normally logs in from the Miami area suddenly logs in from St. Petersburg, Russia.

SpyEye works fast, and can automatically and quickly initiate a transaction much faster than an average person manually on the website. That’s a key trigger for banks to block a transaction. So SpyEye’s authors are now trying to mimic — albeit in an automated way — how a real person would navigate a website.

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