Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab had revealed the Dorifel malware, which targets financial information, has now infected over 3,500 computers around the world and is rapidly spreading.
The virus was first spotted at the end of last week infecting computers in the Netherlands. Since then it has spread around the world and infections have been detected in Denmark, Philippines, Germany, the United States and Spain.
It has primarily infected computers at public sector organisations such as government departments and hospitals.
It initially infected networks through malicious email attachments and once loose travelled to other machines via USBs and network shares, Kaspersky said. It infects a wide range of files, including doc, docx, xls and exe. Once infected it then encrypts the documents, meaning users may not be able to access them.
Kaspersky said it has not yet identified who is behind the malware but did manage to access one of the servers being used by the gang. On it researchers found lots more malware and suggested that users infected with Dorifel may also have more malware on their machines.
"This is a very strong indication that the gang behind the Dorifel malware was also doing some other really nasty scams," said David Jacoby, Kaspersky Lab expert. "If you get infected you might lose financial information, have your files encrypted and also have backdoors installed on your computer."
"We did find some interesting financial information, which could be an indication that this malware scam is related to for example ZeuS / Citadel, but since we have not yet identified any malware related to ZeuS/Citadel we cannot confirm it. All we can confirm is that the same server does store stolen financial information," Jacoby added.
The discovery followed hot on the heels of Gauss, malware that targeted financial information at organisations across the Middle East. Kaspersky Lab said it was created by a nation-state and was almost certainly related to Stuxnet, Flame and Duqu.
