NEW YORK, Feb. 23 (UPI) -- Programs that hack into bank accounts are on the rise, with nearly four times as many detected in 2008 as in 2007, a Finnish security company said.
F-Secure said there were 59,177 programs called "Trojans," circulating on the Internet last year, compared with 15,969 in 2007, USA Today reported Monday.
Users pick up the programs by clicking on either corrupt Web sites or on links that arrive in e-mail. In part, the increased number show how diligently hackers are working to avoid detection by new anti-virus software, the newspaper said.
But the Trojans that can activate themselves while a user is legitimately logged into his or her banking account "are more advanced and evolving faster than anti-virus solutions," Gunter Ollmann at IBM Internet Security Systems told the newspaper.
Doug Johnson, vice president of risk management policy at the American Bankers Association, agreed that the hacking programs were escalating, but told USA Today banking online "on balance is safe."
