TORONTO -- Banking Trojans are perhaps the most malicious form of malware today, with the express purpose of taking your money directly from your bank account.

Regardless of how much damage they may have done in the past, a new generation of banking Trojans is beginning to appear, and they're game for even more pilfering, according to at least one security researcher.

Joe Stewart, senior security researcher at managed security firm LURHQ, detailed the evolution of the banking Trojan into its most malevolent form yet during the InfoSecurity event here.

There are the pre-2001 variety, which act as a general backdoor into a user's PC. The hacker then enters through the backdoor and attempts to gain access to the user's information that way.

>Examples of such Trojans cited by Stewart include BackOrifice, which first appeared in 1998.

The second generation (2G) Banking Trojans are more targeted and come pre-packaged looking for specific information to automatically steal.

Take the "bancos" Trojan, a so-called 2G version with many variants. The number of variants and the actual nomenclature of the various Banking Trojans are not easy to determine, according to Stewart, since different anti-virus companies name the same things differently.

In the case of Bancos, Symantec currently has 26 named variants in its database.

The third generation (3G) of Banking Trojans actually provides for the automation of user activities, he continued.

Put it this way: The 3G Banking Trojan can steal your info and then siphon your account of its cash. The 3G Banking Trojan began with the "Win32.Grams" piece of malware, which first appeared in 2004.

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