Personal accounts are protected from online fraud under Australia's ePayments Code, but businesses face a different risk: liability for malware for businesses small and large is determined by contract.

"As far as commercial customers go, liability for malware fraud would be allocated by contract and certainly from my perspective any properly advised financial institution would seek to allocate risk away from itself and to its counter party," special counsel at Clayton Utz, David Kreltszheim recently told IT Pro.

According to Komarov, around 90 per cent of the victims he had seen in Australia were personal accounts and 10 percent were business accounts. The company gathers its data through the Honeynet security project, infiltrating criminal networks and by sink-holing the botnet, which involves commandeering a component of the botnet and intercepting its communications.

Fairfax Media has seen emails from CERT Australia, the Attorney General's Department's information security response team, that show it is also investigating Carberp infections in Australia, however it declined to comment.

"CERT Australia works on a trust partnership basis with business and does not comment publicly about any specific work or issues," a spokesperson from the A-G's department told IT Pro.

The Australian Government however has been tackling Carberp with the aid of ISPs.

The Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) runs the Australian Internet Security Initiative (AISA), and has been tackling Carberp with the aid of ISPs by sending them alerts, according to Bruce Matthews, ACMA's manager of e-security operations.

"I can confirm that the ACMA is sending reports of Carberp infections to ISPs and universities that participate in the AISI - although this data is not sourced from Group IB," Matthews told IT Pro.

There are around 240 new live Carberp infections every day and ACMA's AISA has been reporting these for the past two years, said Matthews.

However, Carberp could be much larger. "It is also possible that we are reporting some Carberp infections under our 'Trojan: Generic' classification. Around 1500 infections per day are currently being reported under this category," Matthews said.

Microsoft and the FBI's launched an attack on another cybercrime ring last week. They say the Citadel botnet was used to steal more than $US500 million from bank accounts in more than 80 countries, including Australia, over the past 18 months.