One year ago we added malware removal to Trusteer Rapport: (http://www.trusteer.com/company/press/trusteer-adds-free-financial-malware-removal-rapport-secure-browsing-service).
Well, twelve months on, and I’m able to report that we’ve wiped serious financial malware from 1.6 million desktops.
I’m delighted to report that Trusteer are doing even better than the 95% goal we set ourselves a year ago. The reality is that with the multiple layers of protection we’ve integrated into Trusteer Rapport resulting from ongoing development and innovation, combined with our vast experience gained in fighting direct attacks from malware authors, we’ve increased the efficiency of our removal capabilities to a point where we actually have nearly 100% success rate.
Our unique technology allows us to identify the activity of financial malware on a user's computer and to trace this activity all the way back to the files that originally loaded the malware into their memory. This unique capability is not available today in any other technology. We then remove the malicious files and prevent the malware from ever loading again.
1.6 million desktops cleaned in 12 months
Just so you know, our statistics don't include low severity malware such as adware - often included by other anti-malware vendors to boost their figures - as we focus on serious malware. The reality is that, out of the 1.6 million desktops that we’ve cleaned:
72% of the 1.6 million desktops that Trusteer Rapport has cleaned were infected with various versions of Zeus and SpyEye which are to date the most serious threat faced by financial institutions and their customers. What’s interesting is that for each user infected with SpyEye, four users were infected with Zeus. The harsh trust is that, since the Zeus crime kit became free of charge, its distribution almost doubled. That said, SpyEye continues to gain market share and has became the second most distributed financial malware with a significant advantage over the rest of the malware crime kits.
94% of the Zeus and SpyEye infections were removed in less than 10 seconds from the time the infection reached the victim's computer. The remaining 6% were removed within 2 hours.
In the last year we’ve removed, on average, 4,330 severe malware infections a day.
The Importance of Keeping a Clean Customer Base
While Trusteer Rapport includes multi-layer protection that prevents malware from stealing sensitive information and tampering with transactions, the importance of removing malware from your customers' computers is still extremely high as they can still pose a few risks:
Malware can evolve and, if the fraudsters find vulnerabilities in a security solution, they can instruct infected computers to strike and cause enormous damage. Keeping your customer base clean of malware will limit new attacks to purely new infections which, by orders of magnitude, are significantly lower than the potentially infected population.
It prevents fraudsters from collecting sensitive information that may sit outside your customer’s browser - such as email communication and files with financial data and personal information.
Your customer won’t be exposed to immediate threats if they decide to temporarily or permanently stop using a security solution.
100% Effectiveness
Not everyone is having such a good time as, elsewhere in the industry, financial malware detection and removal remains extremely low.
According to SpyEye Tracker, the average SpyEye binary Antivirus detection is 26.77% (https://spyeyetracker.abuse.ch/).
According to Zeus Tracker, the average ZeuS binary Antivirus detection rate is 39.18% (https://zeustracker.abuse.ch/).
These extremely low detection rates emphasise the huge gap in the market when it comes to severe malware toolkits. This is also the main reason that more than 150 financial institutions around the world are using our technology to protect their customers.
Trusteer Rapport is the only technology in the market today that offers 100% detection of Zeus and SpyEye as verified by security specialist S21Sec in this report http://www.trusteer.com/webform/third-party-report-trusteer-efficacy-against-zeus. Using 330 ZeuS samples, it tested and confirmed that our technology has a 100% detection rate. In case you think we cheated, all the samples were chosen by S21sec and were not shared with us prior to the test. Every result is included in the report so you can see for yourself.