'Fighting' virus to steal passwords

A new Trojan appeared from Russia "outmaneuvered" a famous virus by stealing data and then removing the malicious program from the victim's computer .

Security experts who have just discovered the unremarkable Spy Eye toolkit have added a ' Kill Zeus ' feature to 'knock out' a virus called ' Zeus '. This feature removes Zeus malware from the victim computer so that Spy Eye 'exclusively' accesses the username and password.

Zeus and Spy Eye are both Trojans, designed to help hackers easily set up botnet computer networks to steal passwords of online banking transactions. There are more and more similar Trojans, including Filon, Clod and Bugat.

Spy Eye has been disturbing on Russian technology forums since December. With the addition of 'Kill Zeus' feature, Spy Eye becomes the most frightening malware today. Taking advantage of Zeus 'potential', Spy Eye steals data that is being transferred to Zeus 's server.

After that, Spy Eye sold the data to the black market for $ 500 - just one-fifth the price of Zeus sold.

"Fighting" is no longer strange in the cyber crime community. Two years ago, the Storm Worm attacked servers that were under the control of an opponent named ' Srizbi '. A few years ago, the authors of the " Netsky " worm programmed their software to remove Bagle and MyDoom programs - the once-famous viruses.