As 2011 was beginning a month ago, I had written many blog posts about the new spyware and malware trends that were being forecasted for the New Year. One of these included a prevailing fear that smartphones are the next big target for scammers and information hackers. While this should definitely be a huge concern for many smartphone owners, don’t think that the purveyors of malware have forgotten about your desktop and laptops.

Two of the most foreboding spyware viruses are soon going to be connected together, according to a Fox News report. SpyEye and ZeuSTwo, which have largely been competitors in the malware world, are apparently in talks to band together:

“Shouldn’t rival gangs of cut-throat badware makers be enemies? Not so, experts tell FoxNews.com: According to those in the security realm, building Trojan horse software that steals users’ banking information is a business just like any other. Indeed, the merger is comparable to the dealings of the banks and companies they target.”

Just some months ago, the report says that SpyEye was beginning to give up on the trojan program, but new reports suggest that the leftover code is in ZeuSTwo’s hands now:

“The security industry had suspected since October that the criminal masterminds behind ZeuS were abandoning their creation and sending the leftover codes to the creators of SpyEye. And now traces of the updated Trojan are popping up, as authors have been shipping out beta releases of SpyZeus almost daily.
The evolution of these infamous malware tools has those tracking the criminals calling for banks and companies to evolve along with them.”

The key to determining how to handle this news – if it is indeed true – is in the amount of data security you have built into your existing computers and computer networks. If you own a small business, securing your data system is essential to protecting yourself and your clients, so contact an IT security company today.