<img style="float: right" src="http://www.iexbeta.com/images/news/logos/iexVirus.gif">A Trojan horse-type computer virus called Phatbot can steal credit card numbers and launch denial of service attacks on Web sites.

The new virus made its debut on the Internet on Friday (18 March), clogging bandwidth, stealing personal data and initiating denial of service attacks.

Phatbot is a variant of a Agobot, a big family of IRC bots. It can steal personal information such as email addresses, credit card numbers, PayPay details and software licensing codes. It forwards this information using a peer-to-peer (P2P) network, rather than IRC channels exploited by its predecessors. Earlier versions of the bug go by monikers such as Phat, Backdoor.Agobot.fo and Gaobot, according to F-Secure.

Phatbot can also kill any anti-intrusion devices and give people a false sense of security in order to get inside a network and exploit vulnerabilities, F-Secure says.

Phatbot inserts backdoors which can be used to perform distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks aimed at shutting down Web sites including those of German Internet hosting company Schlund, US telecoms firm XO and Stanford University. The bug also terminates processes belonging to competing malware such as MSBlast.

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News source: The Register

Oh well one good thing about this bad boy, if it finds MSBlaster it will terminate it

so now viruses are out there to kill our viruses ? damn its a big virus war now.

wtf are we suppose to do now? i mean not that im thinking negatively....These viruses are getting smarter and harder to kill all the time...now all's they have to do is just walk right into your computer.......and your infected

No, virus writers have always been very smart, at one stage a few years back I used to know a few of them, including the guy who wrote Melissa (it was funny how quickly he disappeared). Most of them have always been able to write code able to infect your system with little, or no interaction, but most of them write stuff as a challenge, and some of the best virus writers never even release their creations into the wild. It just seems that as of late some idiots are on some kind of power trip, or perhaps more teenagers are learning how to code these days. Anyway i'm guessing the scene has changed, but their abilities certainly haven't gotten any better they've just adapted to the new times.

EDIT: by the way i'm not saying Melissa was an advanced worm, i'm just giving example of people I knew. A few years back I used to be an OP on Undernet/#virus