World's Largest Trojan Fraud Uncovered

Israeli police have uncovered a massive industrial spying ring that is alleged to have used Trojan software to snoop into some of the country’s leading companies.

The program appears to have been extremely effective at performing its function of stealing confidential documents from target companies, as well as monitoring activity on infected machines. Police are said to have gained access to a number of FTP servers based in the US and Israel and discovered a "tens of thousands" of documents pillaged by the malware from victim companies.

The fraud is believed to have used two quite simple methods of attack, both of which were able to bypass normal safeguards such as perimeter security or anti-virus programs. The first was to send a disc to a particular individual purporting to contain a business proposal, which when explored would load the Trojan on that person’s PC. Alternatively, the same process could be undertaken via email, and again it is likely that the personalised approach would catch recipients off guard.

The fraud only started to come to light some months ago after Israeli author Amnon Jacont complained that passages of a book he was writing had appeared on the Internet, despite never having left his PC. Subsequent investigations led police to believe that the Trojan written by London-based Michael Haephrati had been responsible, and so the whole fraud started to unravel. If it weren’t for this complaint the Trojan would still be out there, silently stealing information on a huge scale.

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