Cyber Police Pursue Shylock Malware

International law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, the German Federal Police and Europol, are leading a global campaign with the aim to knock out the Shylock malware. The latter infected at least 30,000 computers running Windows across the globe and siphon off money from victims’ online banking accounts. The agencies located and seized command and control servers for Shylock. The malware was dubbed “Shylock”, because quotes from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice were found in its code.

The website domains used to control the malicious software were also shut down, and the global cyber police met a few days ago in the operational centre at the European Cybercrime Centre at Europol in The Hague. Their representatives say they continue to urge everyone to make sure their OS and anti-virus software are updated and relevant.

                             

Most victims of the malware were based in the United Kingdom. Users in the United States, Italy and Turkey have also suffered from the malware, which emerged in late 2011. The intruders spread the malware by sending out links leading to downloads of the malware via email or Skype.

Once installed, the malware would detect when a victim was visiting a banking page, create its fake login sections and steal banking logins. The data would be sent to the criminals, and they would later steal money from the bank accounts. The malware could also take screenshots and record videos of web pages and upload all data to the Internet.

Dell SecureWorks ranked Shylock as one of the top banking malware types of last year. The company, alongside anti-virus provider Kaspersky, assisted the police operation. Security experts say that users who have automated updating for their Windows computers switched on don’t need to do anything, because this will fix any problems for machines infected with the malware. If you are concerned about your computer being infected with the malware, you can head to Microsoft’s support page to know more about what to do with Shylock.

According to the report of the security experts, they expect to see a significant number of infected computers to be cleaned of Shylock after the users automate their operating system update. Unfortunately, they say nothing about Windows XP users, as support of their version has ended a few months ago. Perhaps, those should consider spending money on new OS or a new computer instead of handing it over to the hackers.