Dev.SN

New Zeus Trojan Variant Using Steganography

posted by Dopefish on Friday February 21 2014, @02:30PM   
from the zeus-favored-the-greeks dept.

Keldrin writes:

"Zeus is a trojan designed to steal banking credentials, and has been declared one of the most successful pieces of malware currently seen in the wild. A new variant is making detection far more difficult for anti-virus companies by hiding configuration settings inside pictures. At the moment, the malware simply encodes the configuration with Base64, passes them through XOR and RC4, then attaches them to the end of an image file. This makes for an 'infected' file that is much larger than the original. There is speculation that future releases of the malware will be able to detect minuscule changes to the colors of individual pixels, making the affected files much harder to detect."

• Re:Not Stenography (Score: 4, Insightful) by dmc on Friday February 21 2014, @04:39PM

  by dmc (188) on Friday February 21 2014, @04:39PM (#4528)

  This seems like an improbable attack vector, as the malware would need to store the original image somewhere, or the original pixel values, in order to compare the changes that were made.

  No, I think the simple obvious steganography is to just use the low order bits and ignore the high order bits. No need to have a copy of the original image for that. (but I agree with the improbable assertion, from a passing-non-RTFA attitude explained in another comment)

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+2
  Insightful=2, Total=2
  Extra 'Insightful' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		4