Trojan Terror

When I started an Internet Security consultancy, having one of my son’s friends turn up wanting me to fix his Trojan infected laptop was not what I had in mind. However, as I had a bit of free time I was happy to help out. It was encouraging to see that the PC was configured to automatically receive and install Windows updates and had an ICSA labs certified antivirus security suite installed. Unfortuanetly this meant that as the Malware had breached the PC's defences, it could be something new and unknown and potentially difficult to get rid of. It turned out to be a variant of the Trojan.Win32.agent.Azsy which amongst other things installs a fake antispyware program that tries to induce the user into paying for a full version of the software. Neither Trend House Call or Bitdefender could detect it with a scan, although Bitdefender picked it up when using internet explorer. After an unsuccessful attempt to remove it manually, I resorted to using Spybot Search & Destroy an excellent piece of software that's been most useful to me in the past.

The experience brought to mind a presentation I saw last week from Trend Micro about malware evolution. The presenter claimed that in 1998, there were around 2000 new viruses each year which is about the same number of new Malwares that appear every hour in 2009. Even more interesting was that he more or less admitted that the current model of updating your antivirus software every day was no longer an effective way of protecting your computer. His proposed a solution called Hybrid Cloud-Client Architecture, a name no doubt dreamed up by his marketing team, which seemed ok in principle although I’m sceptical about its workability.

So the bad news from all this is that even with a well configured PC, it’s still easy to get infected with malware. The good news is that I received a bottle of AOC Haut-Medoc for my troubles