New Software Steals Money From Bank Accounts

A devilishly clever new Trojan horse that works over the Internet can hack into bank accounts while people are online and take money without being noticed.

According to CNET, “The bank Trojan, dubbed URLzone, has features designed to thwart fraud detection systems which are triggered by unusual transactions.”

The new program takes online fraud to a new level. And, that should cause significant alarm among consumers. It appears that the experts who create the Trojans have made them so advanced that they will soon be able to get into credit card and brokerage accounts, which could cause a nationwide disruption of the financial system and drive people away from online banking. Financial firms have counted on increasing numbers of people to use the Internet for their transactions which save the banks money on retail locations and tellers.

One of the questions about the Trojans, of course, is where the money goes after it is stolen. If would seem that government agencies like the FBI could track the trail of money and arrest the thieves. It may not be as easy as that if the capital is being moved around the world, a system that file sharing and other malicious internet criminals have already perfected.

If the URLzone Trojan is the beginning of a wave of new attacks on the e-commerce system the use of the internet could be radically altered and that could affect firms from Amazon (AMZN) to eBay’s (EBAY) PayPal, to Wal-Mart (WMT) to Citigroup (C).  Broadband, which was supposed to solve many of the countries problems by bringing information and entertainment into the home and improve business-to-business efficiency may turn out to be the pathway of a real enemy to the credit system.

Douglas A. McIntyre