As reported previously by Infosecurity, cybercriminals have been staging distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against SpyEye Tracker and its ZeusTracker sister security site.
Now it seems that the cybercriminals have coded up a DDoS module for SpyEye itself, causing Anthony Haywood, CTO of data traffic analysis specialist Idappcom to blame the Anonymous group for raising the profile of DDoS attacks.
"What we have been witnessing in the black hat hackersphere these last few months is a mirror image of evolutions in the so-called white hat security arena", he said.
"The development of the Low Orbit Ion Cannon DDoS utility [by Anonymous] showed that it is possible for a few concerted Internet users to stage a powerful DDoS attack on major sites such as MasterCard and this, in turn, made the cybercriminals behind SpyEye realise its potential and add the `feature' the online banking trojan", he added.
The Idappcom CTO went on to say that, had the Anonymous/WikiLeaks DDoS utility not been developed, then the world would have remained largely ignorant of what a powerful weapon a DDoS utility is.
SpyEye, he explained, is a form-grabbing trojan horse malware that operates in a similar manner to Zeus but has been marketed by cybercriminals as a lower-cost alternative darkware application that heists banking credentials from infected users' PCs.
The irony of the DDoS enhancement to SpyEye, says Haywood, is that it will push the price of SpyEye rentals to cybercriminals, and so increase the revenue stream for the developers of the trojan.
"This development really is bad news for those users of the internet who access their banking system online, as it breathes new life into SpyEye, and prolongs the agony of online banking cybercrime", he said.
"It is to be hoped that the citizen evangelists realise the immense mistake they made in developing such a powerful cybercrime weapon as the LOIC utility, and that the genie really is now well and truly out of the bottle", he added.