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Trojan Deletes Your Porn, Music & Warez
E. Vigilant writes "The new Trojan/Erazor-A has an interesting twist. In addition to deleting or disabling various security products and competing malware, it deletes any porn, warez and music in your P2P directories. While some opine that this trojan might have good intentions, remarkably few things infect the text files this trojan also deletes. No one yet knows who wrote this or why."
Without the pain of personal loss, lusers will not be so inclined to tighten up their system. So what if I'm part of a botnet? I'm not using the machine overnight anyway...
Happy LARTing,
FatPhil
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
I see an option 3 here.
3) A strike against the MPAA, RIAA and any other "law abiding" corporation (who manages to be capable of CREATING those very laws) by targeting the computers that seed the incomplete, misnamed and intentionally infected files and the files on computers that have downloaded from them by users stupid enough to download things under 1kb.
Any smart P2P user changes the default directories to customize their own bitspace so it's easier for the person using the software to find what they've downloaded, not to mention archive on another device or media those files they truly wish to retain.
Do note that I did say *smart*.
"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." -Thom
Call me cynical, but add:
4) Write a trojan to wipe out what people apparently consider to be important so that they are more aware of virus scanners.
Hmmm... would the various anti-virus companies do something like this to advertise the need for their products on people who lose gigs and gigs of files to a trojan? Nahhh....
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
The article on the Sophos website actually puts things as they are.
The PC World rehash just (deliberately?) misinterprets it.
Let's have a wee comparison:
Sophos: - "The Erazer Trojan targets internet users it believes are involved in piracy, but fails to discriminate between the true criminals and those who may have MP3 music files or home movies that they have created themselves. Malware is not the way to fight internet piracy."
PC World: - "A "vigilante" Trojan, that attempts to protect infected PCs from the effects of malware caught while using peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, has been discovered."
Now how they came up with that from the Sophos article is beyond my understanding.
This also emphasizes why all P2P users should quarantine their P2P software inside a virtual machine. VMWare's recently renamed VMWare Server" product is free and is a perfect way to isolate your P2P software from the rest of your machine. I actually employ this method myself. Much of the documentation I download is infected and this method prevents that infection from getting back to the host server. Plus it's quite easy to rollback changes to a time before the infection and start over.