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Trojan Installs Anti-Virus, Removes Other Malware
An anonymous reader writes "SpamThru takes the game to a new level. The new virus uses an anti-virus engine to remove potential 'rival' infectious code." From the article: "At start-up, the Trojan requests and loads a DLL from the author's command-and-control server. This then downloads a pirated copy of Kaspersky AntiVirus for WinGate into a concealed directory on the infected system. It patches the license signature check in-memory in the Kaspersky DLL to avoid having Kaspersky refuse to run due to an invalid or expired license, Stewart said. Ten minutes after the download of the DLL, it begins to scan the system for malware, skipping files which it detects are part of its own installation."
Any system that is badly protected enough to get infected is probably already bogging down and in danger of the user getting it fixed. This is probably a very good strategy to improve the usefulness of the machine to the hijacker, and reduce the chances of the user doing anything about the infection. I'm surprised this hasn't happened before.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
When the mob kills people it is usually a rival gang. They want to be the only people milking their territory for good reasons.
Now you see why windows remains the dominant desktop. It is because by its very nature it is a tremendous cash cow, going up and down and sideways across the IT food chain. Very, very few people are altruistic enough to work as hard as they can to put themselves out of business, especially once the work involved becomes more or less easy and routine.
Human nature, you can see it at work in a number of areas, take governments for example. It would be quite possible for governments to work towards fine tuning laws and processes to the point that they are clearly understood, as universally fair as possible, and requiring the least bit of constant interferring-they would have to fire themselves, voluntarily withdraw. It doesn't and won't happen though. Bad car analogy. Could automakers make the million mile car that was super reliable, got good mileage, had decent power, and because of that, actually be cost effective for the consumer in the long run? I bet they could, but there wouldn't be much incentive for them to remain in the car making business, as sales would dreop off severely eventually. The fixit shops would hate it. The oil companies would hate it. Stockholders would hate it.
And so on. You are trying to balance consumer desires with business desires for repeat sales and increasing sales and peripheral sales, in an economic system that values and rewards that over even just a maintainance of the status quo mode. So it obviously doesn't happen... not much anyway.
well i run linux, and i dont find this funny at all. windows botnets are a fucking nuisance to EVERYONE. Running mac os x or linux wont stop you receiving spam emails, or stop a website you need to use being DDOSed.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
I think that in the blaster days there was a copycat worm that downloaded the microsoft anti-blaster patch and installed it (in fact I know there was, because I got 'hit' with it).
It's a nice way to fight zombies, and it might go some way to doing what legal/conventional means have failed to do by using the same viral nature of the original malware to clean the internet up. (While still trying to copy itself from cleaned pc's). The only problem with this is (besides the ethical bit about fighting fire with fire, which I don't really care about) is that the users won't know about it.
Getting infected to the point of having to have somebody clean your system up and install ativirus/firewall/antispyware and a safe browser and email client is a learning experience about how dangerous the internet is these days. If people have their system cleaned up without realizing it, the system may be clean but the people are none the wiser. The best thing, I think would be to install free (as in beer) software, hiding it just until all scans are done and the system has been cleaned and protected, and then, informing the user in some clear way what has happened and what they can do about preventing it in the future, and that they should probably get their system checked out by a human. It would have to do so in some way that doesn't get mistaken for a web-ad, like replacing the wallpaper with the message.
The problem with this scheme of course is that once they get their machine cleaned out the machine won't be spreading the worm anymore and it will lose out to other worms that have the luxury of staying completely still. Maybe if you let the worm hide for two weeks, and then inform the user...