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PandaLabs, a developer of virus and intrusion prevention solutions has detected the appearance of Spymaster.A, a Trojan designed to steal all types of information from computers. It combines spyware and keylogger characteristics, enabling it to capture everything from information about users' Internet usage to user names and passwords entered for services such as online banking and email systems. Moreover, it’s disguising itself as the MSN Messenger application so that users remain unaware of its dangerous presence on their systems. Social engineering features are now becoming prevalent on malware and soon they might even grow faces like your family members.

According to Luis Corrons, director of PandaLabs: "Keylogger Trojans are usually used by cyber-crooks to steal confidential information for fraudulent purposes. Given that, nowadays, financial gain is the main motivation for the creators of malicious code, it is almost certain that more examples will appear, and that they will be increasingly sophisticated and difficult to detect. The way that Spymaster.A hides the process in memory is a good example of this." 

So its time to update that antivirus software of yours and download the latest spyware definitions for your Microsoft AntiSpyware Beta 1. It's a good time too, to install a good firewall software on PC clients like the Sygate Personal Firewall to stop the Spymaster.A from transmitting its information through the File Transfer port (FTP).

A new Trojan Horse called Spymaster.A source