Trusteer, the Boston-based security firm, has announced that ithas discovered a variant of a well-known computer threat,Win32.Ramnit, that has morphed into a new threat that takes aim atfinancial institutions.

Said Trusteer in a statement, “Ramnit configurations capturedand reverse engineered by Trusteer were found to incorporatetactics from the Zeus financial malware platform. Ramnit hasborrowed from Zeus the ability to inject HTML code into a Webbrowser, which it is using to bypass two-factor authentication andtransaction signing systems used by financial institutions toprotect online banking sessions.”

Underlining the size of the threat is a recent report from security expert Symantec that pinpointed Ramnit andvariants as increasingly malevolent. Symantec said that Ramnit wasthe single most blocked malware, alone accounting for 17% of suchcases.