McAfee > Theat Center > Virus Detail Page

Overview

Aliases

• PWS-Banker.gen.a

Characteristics

This is an automatically generated description for Trojan Password Stealers.

Password Stealers may steal data from the hard drive.

This data might include:

CD Keys for various games
credit card details
your local username/password

It may also log keystrokes for login details for banking applications, for example while Internet Explorer is open and connected to specific websites.

As it is trivial for the malware author to modify the Password Stealer to transmit data to a different website or web address, McAfee write detection routines for these Trojans which as a general rule do not include these strings in the detection routines.

This allows McAfee to write more generic detections for these threats and to proactively protect customers against future minor variants.

Therefore it is not possible to always guarantee which website and/or port is being communicated with.

Symptoms

The Trojan is running in the process list.

Mails may be sent using Outlook in some instances, or network traffic on port 25, connecting to a remote SMTP (mail) server to send email data to the malware author.

Method of Infection

N/A. Password Stealers are not viruses, and as such do not themselves contain any method to replicate. However they may themselves be downloaded by other viruses and/or Trojans to be installed on the user's system.

Many of these additionally are mass spammed by the author to entice people into double-clicking on them.

Alternatively they may be installed by visiting a malicious web page (either by clicking on a link, or by the website hosting a scripted exploit which installs the Password Stealer onto the user's system with no user interaction.

Removal

Use the latest Engine/Dats

Variants

Variants

N/A

All Information

Overview -

Aliases

• PWS-Banker.gen.a

Characteristics

Characteristics -

This is an automatically generated description for Trojan Password Stealers.

Password Stealers may steal data from the hard drive.

This data might include:

CD Keys for various games
credit card details
your local username/password

It may also log keystrokes for login details for banking applications, for example while Internet Explorer is open and connected to specific websites.

As it is trivial for the malware author to modify the Password Stealer to transmit data to a different website or web address, McAfee write detection routines for these Trojans which as a general rule do not include these strings in the detection routines.

This allows McAfee to write more generic detections for these threats and to proactively protect customers against future minor variants.

Therefore it is not possible to always guarantee which website and/or port is being communicated with.

Symptoms

Symptoms -

The Trojan is running in the process list.

Mails may be sent using Outlook in some instances, or network traffic on port 25, connecting to a remote SMTP (mail) server to send email data to the malware author.

Method of Infection

Method of Infection -

N/A. Password Stealers are not viruses, and as such do not themselves contain any method to replicate. However they may themselves be downloaded by other viruses and/or Trojans to be installed on the user's system.

Many of these additionally are mass spammed by the author to entice people into double-clicking on them.

Alternatively they may be installed by visiting a malicious web page (either by clicking on a link, or by the website hosting a scripted exploit which installs the Password Stealer onto the user's system with no user interaction.

Removal -

Removal -

Use the latest Engine/Dats

Variants

Variants -

N/A