ZeuS and SpyEye Never Actually Merged

Recent findings claim that the two infamous pieces of malware never actually merged into one powerful Trojan as their authors promised at some point, but now they're suspected to come as a package.

According to The Threat Post, at first, the two malicious elements didn't get along at all. Each one of them had a piece of code that was specially written to detect and annihilate the other, before infecting a device.

At the end of 2010, the author of ZeuS made public the malware's source code and soon after, SpyEye was identified as having one of its features while lacking the one that considered it as competition.

It turns out that there was no official merger, as after the way ZeuS worked was no longer a secret to anyone, SpyEye's creator could have easily taken the pieces he liked most from its greatest rival.

Dmitry Tarakanov, a researcher at Kaspersky Lab, believes that because he felt law enforcement was catching up to him, ZeuS' developer wanted to get out of the hacking business and that's why he published the source.

Tarakanov claims that, however, it is difficult to explain the later modifications brought to ZeuS, which cannot be cataloged as being the work of an amateur. The strange thing is that these new improvements weren't added to SpyEye.

"A programmer really does not like to code one thing twice. So, it's hard to believe that the author of SpyEye somehow developed new features (but different) for SpyEye and for Zeus," he revealed.

A more probable scenario is that the two separate malicious elements are offered to cybercriminals simultaneously, so they can choose the best candidate for each job. There are many things hard to explain about the two, as the expert highlights, there are “too many conflicting arguments." One thing seems to become more certain though and that is the fact that ZeuS' master wants to lay low for a while.