RSA Security released a study this week which revealed that potentially 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies could be affected by the Zeus Trojan. The Zeus Trojan came into the spotlight partly due to the difficulty of detecting and removing it from an infected system. Designed specifically to steal data relating to online banking, the malware comes packaged as a toolkit and sold to criminals. It is so popular, in fact, that the creators have apparently added anti-piracy controls to the latest version.

The security firm analyzed the data found on Zeus control servers, and found information ranging from IP addresses of infected hosts, as well as stolen email addresses. Working on these leads, the company found evidence of infection from 88 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

Interestingly, the report also noted that companies with less than 75,000 employees appear to have the "highest ratio" when tallying evidence of botnet activity to employee count. Do you think this is evidence larger firms are having some measure of success in the perpetual war against malware?

For more on this story:
- check out this article at CNET News
- check out this article at Ars Technica 

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