Once SpyEye had succeeded in stealing a victim's personal information, it was free to run amok in their accounts and do things like transfer money to the account of the hacker who had used the program. But as Computerworld reported in 2011, before authorities were able to get control of the situation, the developers of the malware had to alter its code to make it mimic how a human would act on the internet. A computer program can perform tasks like bank transactions in a fraction of the time it takes us humans to do so with our stubby sausage fingers. Banks were able to create programs that caught transactions that were logically too fast for a human to have done. So the creators of SpyEye had to write the code to make the program slow everything down, performing the tasks necessary to rob people blind in sluggish human time so as not to get caught.

Luckily, authorities were able to put a stop to SpyEye's reign of terror over the millions of people it affected. (According to Trend Micro, one cybercriminal known as Soldier used SpyEye to steal more than $3.2 million in 2010 and '11.) SpyEye Tracker, a website that tracked activity of the malware online, was finally shut down after not recording any SpyEye activity online in over a year, its creator proclaiming that "the SpyEye threat appears to be mitigated."