Zeus Keylogger Steals Your Sensitive Data & Sends It to Hackers
Keyloggers are a form of malicious software designed to record user keystrokes to capture sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, and more. Keyloggers can be installed directly on your computer via emails, social media apps that collect data, or through other malware. Once installed, they can record all of your keystrokes and store them in a file to be sent to the hacker at a later time.
Zeus Keylogger is a keylogging malware variant that was specifically written to collect the victims’ banking information. Zeus leverages the man-in-the-browser keystroke logging and form grabbing, which retrieves authorization and log-in information from a web data form and then sends it to a secure server. This allows the Zeus Keylogger to avoid HTTPS encryption.
Zeus Keylogger also is preprogrammed to identify activity associated with an extensive list of financial institutions, online payment websites, and banks. Should Zeus Keylogger detect that the victim has visited a domain on its list of financial sites, it will immediately begin capturing the user’s keystrokes. Zeus can also record screenshots to more easily steal online banking passwords, social security numbers, and other payment information, including bank account and credit card numbers.
Zeus Keylogger has additional functionality that replaces some banks’ pages with its own fake content to trick victims into directly typing their credentials into a portal that sends the data directly to the keylogger’s operators.
Detecting and Removing Zeus Keylogger
Part of what makes Zeus Keylogger such a troublesome malware is that it is extremely difficult to detect on the affected computer. Most times, an infected computer will not behave any differently or show any obvious symptoms or signs of infection. It’s even worse if Zeus Keylogger is working together with a rootkit infection. In such cases, Zeus Keylogger may not even show up in the Task Manager as it sits quietly in your system collecting valuable financial data. For this reason, we highly recommend that you always maintain a reputable malware remediation tool on your computer to scan for infections like Zeus Keylogger regularly.
For more tips on troubleshooting and removing spyware, like the Zeus Keylogger, visit our Best Practices section.
