Cyber criminals have adopted an open source model with the vision of making development of banking Trojans and other malware far easier than they are today.

According to security experts, the new threat emerged after the developers of Citadel had embraced the open source and Software as a Service model, thus facilitating themselves with a more efficient platform to come up with more advanced and deadlier malware. Citadel happens to be one of the latest variant of the notorious Zeus Trojan.

Ever since VXers adopted the open source malware approach, many new modified versions of Zeus Trojan have come up over the past few weeks.

In a report by security firm Seculert, it has been revealed that the creators of this malicious software have set up communication platforms, through which fellow e-banking defrauders and hackers can contact each other. Through this community platform the cyber criminals can talk with each other regarding any new characteristics of the malware, and inform about the bugs occurring in the system.

This new open source adoption has facilitated the development of new versions of malware. Many new versions of this software have been unveiled by the Citadel creators, which entail many new characteristics and modules.

With this new adoption of open source malware, the cyber criminals have been able to generate 20 new botnets. This has been done with the assistance of Citadel malware. The Citadel malware has been acting as the FreeBSD of cybercriminals. Those newly created botnets have severely affected, over 100000 machines.

[Source: The Register]