Standalone utility available for download on MalwareCity.com to protect against new threat 

SYDNEY & AUCKLAND – October 19, 2010 – BitDefender®, an award winning provider of internet security solutions, has announced a free removal tool targeting Trojan.Downloader.Carberp.A, a newly identified Trojan that is capable of stealing details from websites that require login sessions, such as online banking and email.

Once burrowed into your PC, Trojan.Downloader.Carberp.A keeps an eye on every service that is important enough to require SSL authentication. It also monitors a list of websites containing online banking portals and compares your Internet activity against it.

“Every time you login using SSL-based authentication to services such as online banking or Ebay, Trojan.Downloader.Carberp.A is capable of stealing your details before they are encrypted,” says Catalin Cosoi, head of BitDefender’s online threats lab. “What’s alarming is that the Trojan will send your details to its command and control (C&C) server over an unsecured connection and into the hands of the attacker, before your login request has even reached its intended destination.”

Once Trojan.Downloader.Carberp.A connects to its C&C server, it downloads an encrypted configuration file, along with additional firepower such as plugins. This allows Trojan.Downloader.Carberp.A to intercept Internet traffic and to kill whatever antivirus it may find on the recently infected computer. It then sends the C&C server a unique ID and uploads a list of currently running processes via an HTML request. 

To protect against Trojan.Downloader.Carberp.A, BitDefender has released a free removal tool that is available from the download section of MalwareCity.com. For a full list of BitDefender 2011 features and benefits by product, visit www.bitdefender.com.au or follow BitDefender on Twitter for daily malware alerts.