Zeus Malware has brought a high damage to banks in the U.K and the U.S with millions of dollars stolen . The average amount behind the Zeus/Zbot malware is to cash in tens of millions of dollars.
The Zeus malware kit was sold on underground websites to anyone who wantsed to set up a cybercriminal operation, as they pay few thousand dollars
It was a ready made kit, with all instruction on how to build the Trojan and lot
The source code was leaked in 2011 and initially it was up for grabs only from specific locations but now it can be found in Google search on single click
After several unfitting variants, the underground forums were provided with a new malware kit dervied from Zeus code, called Citadel
The operation worked for at least one year and a half, until Microsoft announced in June 2013 that the command and control servers for the botnets created by Citadel had been seized and were under the supervision of the good guys
Citadel had spawned 1,462 botnets, while the number of infected computers amounted to millions.
However, the organized crime regrouped quickly and came up with a new, significantly enhanced variant of Zeus, called GameOver Zeus, which was tightly controlled by a core group in Russia and Ukraine since October 2011.The GameOver Zeus botnet was dismantled in what was called Operation Tovar
In recent reports from security researchers, the GameOver Zeus malware is making a comeback, a little over a month after dismantling the botnet.It has been reported recently that a group of cybercriminals successfully evaded the Citadel take-down in 2013 as well as the latest attempt from law enforcement to disrupt the GameOver Zeus operations, in June 2014.
It may not take long until a new malware family replaces Zeus and buries it in the history pages of the security industry, but its resilience against the deployment of forces that include law enforcement agencies and leading security companies around the globe is definitely increasing the standard in malware writing.