Police e-crime unit swoops on Zeus suspects

The UK Police Central E-crime Unit has followed the successful prosecution of four cyber criminals yesterday with the arrest in Manchester of two alleged hackers.

Reports in the Manchester Evening News claim that officers arrested the pair for offences under the Computer Misuse Act 1990 and the 2006 Fraud Act. The man and woman were thought to have been using the Zeus or Zbot Trojan to steal information needed to break into users' bank accounts.

Detective superintendent Charlie McMurdie, who heads up the unit, told the paper that the pair were the first people in Europe to be arrested over the scam.

"Suspects are harvesting millions of lines of data from infected computers. More than 200,000 lines of data were being compromised per day," she added.

"Obviously the amount of financial harm that could be caused by using that data is huge if fast and timely action had not been taken."

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at security firm Sophos, welcomed the news.

"Zbot is a significant malware family. The many different variants of the Trojan in existence have been distributed in a variety of different disguises," he said in a blog post.

"If the police have made a positive step in unravelling the gang behind Zbot, that will be very good news for everyone interested in making the internet a safer place."