McAfee Labs Says That Project Blitzkrieg Is A Real Threat To The US

McAfee Labs has issued a report that states Project Blitzkrieg is a credible threat to the United States' banks. This follows a string of DDoS attacks that targeted banks through the US back in October. If Project Blitzkrieg is carried out as claimed, the ramifications will be far beyond that of October's attacks.

Project Blitzkrieg is run by an individual known only as vorVzakone, and was discovered by RSA researchers. On a Russian forum, vorVzakone announced that 30 US banks would be targeted early next year using a trojan to infect users computers. He then began actively recruiting other hackers to join him in his mission.

VorVzakone claims that the trojan's creation began back in 2008, and that thus far it has been used to transfer $5 million. According to McAfee, the forum post is "very generic," but makes mention of a new trojan. Some have been inclined to believe the claims and trojan are real, while critics have expressed doubt over the project.

Now McAfee has tossed its voice into the mix: "Our analysis suggests it is authentic, though the timing of the fraudulent activity is unknown. In order to validate some of the claims, we tracked down the server that

vorVzakone used in early pilot stages of Project Blitzkrieg and identified the variant that infected victims ... Additional investigation has led us to confirm the variant and time frame when this particular campaign was live at a given location, further validating that Project Blitzkrieg is real and not fictional."

[via McAfee]