Anatomy of an Attack: ESET Uncovers How Trojan Stole Login Credentials of Over 16,000 Facebook Users

ESET, the leader in proactive protection against Internet threats with a 20 year history, has discovered a social engineering trojan horse. The piece of malware was managed to steal the login credentials of more than 16,000 Facebook users. The focus of the malware was on stealing personal Facebook (FB) login details and linking these with the user statistics of Texas HoldEm Poker, in case the victim plays this game. The detection stats of ESET have shown that the threat was spreading almost exclusively in Israel. It needs to be added that the targeted application is a legitimate and very popular FB application by Zynga Inc. According to AppData, the application has a monthly share of 35 million active users.
ESET began studying the Trojan at the beginning of 2012. However, thanks to proactive generic detection of this threat, the users of ESET security solutions were protected against it already from December 2011. As the detection stats have shown that the threat disseminated primarily in Israel, ESET has contacted Israeli CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team) as well as Israeli police in early 2012. During the investigation we could not provide any details about this threat publicly and presently this threat has been deactivated.