Zeus Panda- the Banking Malware exploiting your Search Engine Results

Zeus Panda had been prevalent since many years as a Banking Trojan and one should be aware of the distribution manner of these Trojans. They basically target the online banking logins, rob you of your money and install additional malwares on your vulnerable system. Now, the bad part- it is almost impossible to detect the presence of this Trojan by just having the look at the contents of the screen as it specializes in blending with the look of a particular banking or payment website perfectly until and unless you opt to run a full system scan with the help of a security application. So, it is very much possible that the Trojan could have been present on your PC until you detected it. Cybercriminals are continually intruding and infecting system all across the world. Now they have found a way to infect the users’ system with this Banking Trojan through poisoning Search Engine results and using Google Search to spread and infect the systems.

What is the Modus Operandi of this Trojan?

It basically steals your banking credentials by combining with Search Engine Optimization popularly known as SEO. The cybercriminals compromise the legal websites and their authentic pages by embedding their own content having that malware. The sites which are targeted contain that particular financial keyword that an individual must be searching for and they appear at the top. They target the specific audience and take care of the most frequently searched keywords to spread infection. The websites which get pop-up at the top of the legitimate Google Search results ultimately initiate a multistage malware infection in the user’s system. The keywords which have been targeted contain specific financial institutions from Middle East, India, Sweden and Australia.

Cisco Talos which is the leading threat intelligence group is behind discovering this malicious Zeus Panda and has also released the technical details, Google search queries which were used to redirect the users to malicious pages and other new variant of Zeus Panda. Cyber attackers have successfully been adopting new techniques to launch attacks and robust threat intelligence is required to keep the new threats and like campaigns into check.

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