Feeling the heat of the attention of international law enforcement and the recent takedowns of various botnets and the worldwide arrests of gang members using his malware, the developer of the ZeuS Trojan has chosen to disappear and lay low for a while.


And, according to Brian Krebs, he has handed over its source code to the developer of SpyEye, the Trojan toolkit that aimed to be the principal rival of the infamous ZeuS.

"I will service the Zeus product beginning today and from here on," said the SpyEye developer - who goes by the handle "Haderman" - in a post on a hacker forum. "I have been given the source codes free of charge so that clients who bought the software are not left without tech support. Slavik doesn’t support the product anymore, he removed the source code from his [computer], he doesn’t sell [it], and has no relationship to it. He also doesn’t conduct any business on the Internet and in a few days his contact [information] will not be active."

He also mentioned that the two Trojans will be merged into one that will contain the best features of the two and some additional functions, which begs the question: are some of the new capabilities of the recently emerged new ZeuS version the result of this merger?

Also: what new malicious code can we expect from Slavik - since it is highly doubtful he has "retired" for good?