Malware Declines, Trojans Dominate 79
Orome1 writes "According to data gathered by Panda Security, only 39 percent of computers scanned in February were infected with malware, compared to 50 percent last month. Trojans were found to be the most prolific malware threat, responsible for 61 percent of all cases, followed by traditional viruses and worms which caused 11.59 percent and 9 percent of cases worldwide, respectively. These figures have hardly changed with respect to the January data."
Re:System Tools (Score:3, Interesting)
If it only resides in one directory, consider yourself lucky. The last one I was dealing with (can't recall the name, but it was one of the ones that screws with your Internet connection and redirects everything to their "pay $75 and you get to use your computer again" site) put copies of itself in a half dozen places, several of them quite creative,all with different and innocuous-sounding filenames. Each one was programmed to start up, look for the existence of the others, and if one or more were missing it copied itself to them and re-established the startup for each of the missing ones.
One of them was even programmed to only check-and-restore on every five startups or so, so the whole damned thing came back while I was in the middle of catching the computer up on its Windows Updates, an hour after I thought I had the machine completely scrubbed clean. It was hiding itself under a filename that looked like a driver for the touchpad. Clever bit of thinking, actually - victim takes computer to pro, pro cleans the gunk out, victim takes machine back home and a week or so later the infection magically reappears.
Took me hours to rip out that sunovabitch. I told the user to back up their data NOW and if it came back to bring the machine back with the recovery discs so I could nuke the damned thing from orbit.