Cybercrimals take over thousands with the Mumba botnet

INSECURITY OUTFIT AVG Technologies said cybercriminals have taken over thousands of systems with the Mumba botnet.

AVG's web security team released the report, which reckons that the Mumba botnet malware has infected 55,000 PCs around the world.

Apparently the botnet has been responsible for stealing up to 60GB of personal data. The compromised data includes bank account details and credit card numbers.

The US has suffered the lion's share of the hack with 33 per cent of infected systems, Germany comes in second with 17 per cent, Spain has 7 per cent and the UK 6 per cent while Mexico and Canada each have 5 per cent. We don't think the British, Mexicans and Canadians are more security aware, which means that the hackers specifically targeted the US in the malware attacks, possibly because it's a bigger target.

The Mumba botnet was developed by the Avalanche Group to maximise the number of malware attacks and it uses the latest version of Zeus. Zeus hit the headlines back in April when the banking Trojan was spotted moving from Internet Explorer to Firefox as well.

We reported that Zeus 1.6 was in the wild but insecurity vendors said a beta version of 2.0 was being tested by certain criminal groups.

"The unique infrastructure of the Mumba botnet means that going after the servers hosting the stolen data is now much more difficult than before," said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, SVP at AVG.

"As cybercriminals become increasingly sophisticated, it is paramount that consumers and corporations prevent their PCs from becoming the next victim in these dynamic cyber attacks by using anti-virus and LinkScanner tools such as those that AVG offers for free." µ