The EUobserver reports that a recent conference in Brussels on cyber security and digital crimes, organized by the Microsoft Corporation, revealed a number of ominous statistics with regards cyber attacks against online banking within the European Union.  Mr. Tim Rains, director of Microsoft’s computing division, said, “The Netherlands and Germany are under constant attack from an online banking trojan called EyeStye. It is now one of the number one threats.” Described by Mr. Rains, and reported by the EUobserver, “The parasite is able to bypass anti-virus software and lurk undetected for long periods. The malicious programmme, once downloaded and launched, attempts to steal sensitive data and send it to an attacker.” Rains went on, “the Trojan socially engineers its victims by luring them through innocuous-looking prompts to change security settings.” Rains described “infections in the past year in the Netherlands through the roof.”

Rains also cited the Zbot trojan which has been active since 2007 and continues to spread quickly. It is designed and built to “purposely steal financial information from infected computers.” The trojan “is found most frequently in Spain, where one out of every 100 Microsoft Windows operated computers in 2010 was infected.”

Among the other statistics offered were that “Romania consistently ranks as the member state in the EU with the most infected computers. Around 15 percent of computers in Romania are infected with viruses. And over 11 percent have worms.”  With regards other EU countries, “the top four EU countries with the most malware infections detected by Microsoft in the second half of 2011 are France, Germany, the UK and Italy. In France, the company detected nearly 2 million infections, followed by Germany with just under 2 million, the UK with 1.5 million and Italy with around 1.3 million.”

As a comparison, “The United States had over 10 million detections in the second half of 2011. Norway, Denmark and Finland have the lowest number of detections in the EU with less than three computers out of 1,000 infected.”