Symantec has discovered a new piece of malware that appears to be targeting financial institutions and their customers in the US. Dubbed Trojan.Stabuniq by Symantec, the malware has been collecting information from infected systems—potentially for the preparation of a more damaging attack.

According to a post on Symantec's blog contributed by Symantec employee Alan Neville, Trojan.Stabuniq appears to be aimed at a very specific set of victims. While the number of reported systems compromised by the Trojan are relatively low, nearly 40 percent of the systems are financial institutions' mail servers, firewalls, proxies, and gateways. Half of the systems infected are consumer PCs, and the remainder of the detected infections are on systems belonging to network security companies—likely because they are evaluating the threat posed by the Trojan.

The malware appears to be spread by a "phishing" attack through spam e-mail containing a link to the address of a server hosting a Web exploit toolkit. Once installed, it changes the Windows registry to disguise itself—usually as a Microsoft Office or Java component, or in the guise of an Internet Explorer "helper" module, InstallShield update scheduler, or sound driver agent—and makes sure it is activated at reboot. Then it collects information about the computer it has infected (including its computer name, IP address, the operating system version and which service packs are installed, and the names of running processes on the computer), and dumps that data to a command and control server at one of eight domain names.

On the surface, this theft seems relatively benign, and Stabuniq is fairly easily removed and blocked once it is discovered. But it could be just a proof-of-concept for another attack in preparation for deployment of a much more malignant set of code.