14 DAY TRIAL // In case you haven't read part I and II of these reports, let me say it all in a nut shell for you. It all started last week when a trojan virus called Prg assaulted the job search website "Monster" and stole a lot of user account data. It also jumped other similar sites but Monster was the most affected one. Thing is, because of its mutating code it could not be taken down by anti-viruses.
That's what happened till now - tough to beat virus, steals a lot of data, hackers not found yet. But here comes the news in this case - finally, Monster Worldwide found one of the servers that was siphoning personal info from the resumes of job seekers. It has been shut down instantly, as The Register informs us.
This is certainly good news, if one server was found, I do believe they will be able to find the rest as well and then get to the bottom of things. As I've seen on the same site mentioned above, the Symantec people had also made a great disclosure in this matter - individual computers that were infected were programmed to use pilfered recruiter credentials to pull a broad range of data relating to job candidates and feed them to a server in Eastern Europe. Why doesn't this surprise me? Some of the world's greatest hackers reside in that part of Europe... well, anyway, hackers are still continuing to use this trojan to steal more information, in order to help them in their spam-and-scam scheme, but I think they might just be caught.
As I've said before, it is very probable that this campaign will not be stopped by anti-virus developers that will create a program to repel the virus, but by the ones that will track the hackers down and then send the Police to take 'em down. Let's hope things will get better and that the hackers will get caught soon. I will come with more details on this as soon as some new info surfaces.