The Serious Organised Crime Agency has helped Virgin Media spot 1,500 customers whose computers had been compromised with a bank password-stealing trojan.
Virgin Media worked with SOCA for several months on tracking down infected customers, and has now written to subscribers who have been infected with the SpyEye trojan to warn them of the dangers.
The ISP stressed that it wasn't tracking users or monitoring their connections, and said the infections had actually been spotted by SOCA in its ongoing investigations into botnets.
We send a letter because people can be wary of emails about security issues
“We started working on botnet and malware protection for customers last year and have been broadening it,” said a spokesperson for Virgin Media.
“SOCA got in touch with us and said it had been tracking this trojan and had seen some of our customers were infected, so we got in touch with them to warn them.”
According to Virgin, SOCA monitors the botnets in a bid to keep track of malware, and joined the bot networks in order to see where connections were coming from - a tactic that supplied the SOCA sleuths with IP addresses, which they passed to Virgin.
“If we know they have the infection, then we know the security software is either non-existent or out of date so we write them a letter," the spokesperson said. "We send a letter because people can be wary of emails about security issues.”
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