Can Windows 9x be Hacked Like This?

[esecallum]

NEWS:-

Hackers have siphoned more than half-a-million pounds from UK bank accounts since July using a variant of the Zeus banking Trojan, according to security company M86.

M86 discovered the theft after gaining access to a command-and-control server in Moldova, the company said in a paper published on Tuesday (PDF). Between 5 July and 4 August, hackers stole £675,000 from the customers of one of the biggest UK financial institutions, according to M86.

Mark Kaplan, M86's chief security architect, told ZDNet UK on Wednesday that just under 37,000 British computers had been infected by the Trojan as part of the attack, with around 3,000 bank accounts compromised....read the rest of the article first.

HERE:-

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/security-threats/2010/08/11/zeus-attack-nets-675000-from-uk-bank-customers-40089796/

The question is :-

Can this and similar trojans work just as well on 9x systems or just on more complex systems like xp and vista as due to their increased complexities they have more entry points.

Also do you have to prove to the banks about these trojans which is impossible for Average Joe to do or will the banks just weasel their way out and not refund their customers?

Are passbooks in person accounts safer then online accounts which are increasingly easier to steal from?

[Fredledingue]

If most computers were running w98, most viruses would be designed to work on w98. But most computers run XP/Vista/7 and viruses may or may not work on w98. It depends on the code.

They also make use of well-known and easier breaches in XP/Vista and not of more difficult and less-known w98 breaches possibly useless on XP/Vista.

Technicaly w98 is safer than XP and Vista, but it's false to say that it cannot be hacked. You can if you realy want to.

XP can be secured with efficiency to the level of w98 and even better without a firewall or anti-viruses, but few poeple do that because some programs and some files used by common programs must either have special privileges or be located somewhere outside the Program Files folder. As a result it's quiet difficult to set up and use a safe, restricted user account on XP and most poeple expose themselves on the internet 24/7 on an administrator account.

W98 is definitely safer than an XP administrator account but not safer than an XP restricted account. On Vista it's a little bit different and it depends more on the user's behavior IMO.

Banks often have insurances against such frauds and often refund volontarily their clients on a fairness basis. It's at the bank discretion but they are eager to keep their clients.

The refund may be in full for small sums or partial for bigger ones.

Recently russians hackers stole very small amounts disgized as bank transfer fees from a lot of poeple. They went unoticed for months.

Edited August 18, 2010 by Fredledingue