Zeus rains from the cloud

A new variant of the Zeus trojan is using the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) web service for its command-and-control center, according to IT management and software vendor CA. Attackers are pushing the latest Zeus, or Zbot, variant by using fake holiday greeting card spam messages that contain a malicious executable called “xmas2.exe.” One executed, the trojan communicates with the cloud-based command hub. — AM