European bank faces cyber theft worth 500,000 Euros: Report

London: Kaspersky Lab has reportedly detected a server used to co-ordinate an attack that appeared to have stolen over 500,000 Euros in a single week, from a European bank.

The firm said it believed most of the victims were based in Italy and Turkey, and they had alerted the authorities to the problem. However the criminals managed to delete any evidence that could have been used to trace them before they could be identified, the BBC reported. Kaspersky has codenamed the campaign Luuuk, and said that it believed a Trojan program was used to intercept financial data and allow fraudulent transactions to be made as soon as each victim logged into their online bank account. Principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab Vicente Diaz said that on the command-and-control server they detected there was no information as to which specific malware program was used in this campaign. He added that the company believes the malware used in this campaign could be a Zeus flavour. Zeus is the name given to a type of Trojan malware first detected in 2007, which allows data to be stolen from computers running the Windows operating system. It has been linked to previous bank thefts that ran into the millions of pounds. The report said that according to the computer logs it had obtained, the sums stolen from each account appeared to range from 1,700 Euros to 39,000 Euros. While the detected computer server has now been shut down, the firm warned that it believed the thieves could strike again, adding that it planned to search for evidence of the Luuuk campaign continuing, the report added.