Fujacks changes icons of infected programs to a picture of a panda holding joss-sticks, and steals information from users.
In the final quarter of 2006 alone, SophosLabs detected 31,000 different Web pages containing versions of the Fujacks malware.
According to Chinese media reports, six men all in their twenties have been apprehended. One of those arrested, 25-year-old Li Jun, and is believed to use the handle "Whboy" and to be the creator of the Fujacks malware.
Li Jun, who lives in Wuhan, the capital city of Hubei Province in central China, was said in a police statement to have earned more than US $12,500 by selling the malware to other internet hackers. The Chutian Metropolis Daily has claimed that Li was motivated to create the virus after he failed to find an IT job in Guangzhou and Beijing.
"I wanted to find a job with an internet security company, but I failed every time," Li Jun is reported to have told police. "I wrote the program to express my discontent."
"The international community should applaud the Chinese authorities for investigating one of their first major cybercrime cases," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos. "With so much malware and spam being distributed from Chinese computers we can only hope that a strong message will be sent out to other criminals based in the country."
If found guilty of writing and spreading the malware, Li Jun could face a five year jail sentence.
