SOCA and Virgin partner in SpyEye fight

Malware

The Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has joined forces with Virgin Media to help stop the spread of the dangerous SpyEye Trojan.

As part of the campaign, SOCA has identified around 1,500 Virgin Media customers infected with the SpyEye Trojan, which could place them at risk of identity theft or bank fraud.

Virgin has written to affected customers, offering them advice on how to remove the Trojan and help if they feel unable to take care of SpyEye themselves.

"SOCA works with a range of private sector partners to help prevent cyber criminals from exploiting legitimate businesses and their customers," said Lee Miles, SOCA head of cyber.

"We welcome steps taken within industry to utilise the information and resources provided by law enforcement and raise awareness of online safety."

SpyEye in the sky

Trusteer today revealed it had uncovered a SpyEye variant which targeted two leading European airline travel websites Air Berlin and Airplus.

The former is the second biggest airline in Germany, the latter a business travel service.

"In the case of the Air Berlin attack, SpyEye is attempting to harvest confidential user information including username and password, and other data that is entered in the targeted web page," said Amit Klein, chief technology officer of Trusteer, in a blog post.

"The injection code of SpyEye captures the information on username and password details."

In the AirPlus case, SpyEye targets users of the Lufthansa Miles & More Visa credit card, which offers travel bonuses.

"In this instance, SpyEye injects code into the users' web browser that claims to be an anti-fraud enhancement to the online," Klein added.

"In reality, of course, this is a cleverly-disguised attempt to phish user credentials from the unsuspecting customer of the AirPlus Web portal."

Tom Brewster

Tom Brewster is currently an associate editor at Forbes and an award-winning journalist who covers cyber security, surveillance, and privacy. Starting his career at ITPro as a staff writer and working up to a senior staff writer role, Tom has been covering the tech industry for more than ten years and is considered one of the leading journalists in his specialism.

He is a proud alum of the University of Sheffield where he secured an undergraduate degree in English Literature before undertaking a certification from General Assembly in web development.