June 1, 2004

Taiwanese police arrested on Thursday a 30-year-old computer engineer surnamed Wang for allegedly writing a Trojan-horse program called Peep.exe that was used by Chinese hackers to attack computers in Taiwan, according to a statement released by Taiwan's Criminal Investigation Bureau (CIB). A Trojan horse is a computer program that appears to be innocuous but also performs an illegitimate function.

The Chinese-language Peep.exe Trojan horse, also known as PeepBrowser.exe among other names, was allegedly distributed over the Internet by Wang to hackers in China, who used the program disguised as a small game to attack thousands of computers in Taiwan, CIB said.

At least two major versions of the Trojan horse are known to have been developed, CIB said. The first version records keystrokes made on a computer and transmits keystrokes for passwords and other information, such as bank account numbers, to the distributor of the program.

A second version of the program is more powerful, enabling hackers to take control of the computer remotely, including running applications, downloading files and altering the system registry files, CIB said.

A utility from the CIB to remove known versions of Peep.exe can be download fromhttp://www.cib.gov.tw.

Source: IT World Canada

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