In a recent blog post, Damballa vice president of research Gunter Ollman looked at recent updates to the Zeus botnet kit that are keeping the threat alive and growing.

"Via its many different incarnations, Zeus remains one of the most popular and varied kits around, he said, and from older versions that trade hands for next to nothing to cutting-edge high-end iterations that are offered for as much as $700 a pop, the DIY botnet creation tools themselves represent a diverse underground market," writes eWeek's Matthew Hines.

"In a nod to the availability and potency of the Zeus campaign, the expert noted that in many popular hacking forums Zeus kits are currently being sold that are 'fully operational within a network running Windows 7' and that have the ability to sniff IPv6 network traffic to look for valuable data to intercept," Hines writes.

Click here to read the eWeek story.