Talking Trojan taunts victims

Malware authors have developed a talking Trojan capable of taunting its victims even as it goes about its work trashing their PCs. The BotVoice-A Trojan informs victims that their Windows PCs have been infected as it deletes files. The malware uses Windows text reader to play the following message: You has been infected I …

[Anonymous Coward]

Use of English

If virus writers are going to infect the world with their wares, they could at least do so with grammatically correct English. Perhaps this is a reflection of their poor IQ.

[David Eddleman]

Not really...

Or, it could be an indication that, like many of us suspect, that they're not from a country that has English as it's native language? Russia, perhaps.

[Jason Togneri]

Idiots on both sides

I think this is another case of morons out there who still are convinced that all these viruses are the work of teenage American kids, rather than fifty-year-old Russian criminals. I blame Hollywood. Think about it - all the intelligence and programming skills required to do this. Where would your average American teenager get those from?

[Ron]

Re: Idiots on both sides

It may surprise you to find out that creating a simple virus or Trojan isn't a simple task. And you'd be awfully surprised about how skillful teenage American (or Canadian, UKian, etc) kids can be.

I won't argue that some malicious code is, indeed, written by criminals (be it Russian, Chinese, or American), but it's a mixture.

[Alan Donaly]

huh? trojan thats not a trojan.

A trojan creates a backdoor to allow unauthorised

use of a PC usually to create a bot for distributed

computing this doesn't do any of those things this

is just a destructive toy no matter who cleverly coded

it it's not for anything useful (to the author or whoever

might buy this) it may be a threat I don't know (it's method

of deployment) not to

me but to Windows users to me it screams cute whoever

did it just wanted to stir the s*** and seems to have done so.

[Richard Fontaine]

Chinese?

In the event that some readers are unaware, this would appear to be a test by our Asian friends, given the clueless syntax.

[David Knapman]

Re: huh? trojan thats not a trojan.

Um, you might want to go and check your definitions.

A trojan is a program that enters your system under the guise of a non-malicious program. (You know, as in the Trojan horse, whence it gets its name).

The fact that many trojans set up backdoors, etc, is a by-the-by.

[Anonymous Coward]

A trojan is ...

Quote Alan Donaly "A trojan creates a backdoor to allow unauthorised use of a PC ..."

In fact 'trojan' (named with regard to the Trojan Horse) is a malware which is allowed to gain access to the system by masquerading as something else and is at face value not harmful.

Alan is thinking of "Worm"

[Stuart Van Onselen]

Definitions

Mr Donaly: I'm afraid you have your malware definitions confused.

A trojan is not defined as a program that leaves a backdoor. A trojan is any malware that pretends to be something benign, and relies on the user to manually run it. Usually these are left on download sites where people get them, thinking they're something useful, like a utility program or a multimedia file.

Compare that to a virus: A piece of malware that attaches itself to another program, and is run when that program is run. Once active, it then attaches itself to other programs. It relies on users unknowingly exchanging infected executables to spread.

Finally, a worm is a program that actively distributes itself, say over the internet, by scanning for computers and trying to infect them via network vulnerabilities.

The definitions of these malware forms are independent of any other actions they might take. That is, worms, viruses and trojans may do nothing more than try to spread themselves, or they may all do things like delete files, steal passwords, or leave backdoors.

If you go to Wikipedia, I'm sure you'll be able to find more info on these and other malware forms than you could possibly be interested in... :-)

[Matthew Saroff]

All Your Base Are Belong To Us

Kind of surprised that I'm the first to think of making that comment.

[Anonymous Coward]

sound

just switch your speakers off!