Microsoft fights gaming Trojan menace Microsoft is claiming big successes in its efforts to to rescue gamers from malware. The latest (June) edition of Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) included a device to remove password stealers from infected machines. MSRT is a basic anti-malware tool designed to zap prevalent forms of malware. Signature …
"If you plug a USB stick into an infected machine, that gets the pox too." Yeah, but you can't get "the pox" from the USB stick (unless you manually run it from there), because autoplay doesn't work for USB drives.
Trojans don't "spread". If something can replicate itself, it is a virus - not a Trojan.
"By comparison, the Storm worm was removed from under 350,000 machines in the first month that detection was added to MSRT." Yeah, but the Storm family of Trojans (it's not a worm) uses server-side polymorphism - meaning that just about every instance of it is a different variant. There is no guarantee that the Tool has found them all - in fact, it most likely hasn't, thus the lower numbers.
***"Matt McCormack, a security researcher at Microsoft and gamer, posits the theory that part of the reason for the high incidents of infection might be that gamers avoid running anti-virus software out of concerns it might impair the performance of their machines."***
What?
"Might impair the performance...."
I have yet to see a PC with AV installed that *doesn't" perform like a geriatric slug. Whenever someone complains about their PC being slow I have found that uninstalling AV is the action that results in the single biggest speed boost, way ahead of installing more memory, defragging the HD or cleaning the registry.
True, true...
I found that even AVs that used to be ok (F-Secure and AVG) are becoming total crap. Newest F-Secure is terrible.
I found NOD32 quite alright, it doesn't slow down machine to a crawl. Yet.
Then you think why Macs and Linux boxen are faster that Windows even on shit hardware... XP is also nice when it's a freshly installed. But then you have 2 choices: AV to slow you down or Virii to slow you down. One better that another!
NOD32 does some really nice protection - like stopping you running legitimate programs or anything apart from a web browser that users port 80. It's also as bad as malware to try and get rid of. Avoid.
Mind you at least it's not McAfee or Norton as they are frikkin terrible at screwing over peoples machines so nothing runs faster than a syphilitic snail.
""If you plug a USB stick into an infected machine, that gets the pox too." Yeah, but you can't get "the pox" from the USB stick (unless you manually run it from there), because autoplay doesn't work for USB drives."
"Yeah, but" Autoplay works very well with USB drives - http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=USB+autoplay&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 JFGI before you state a fact. Worse still if you set it up juuuust right you can run things off of a USB stick then pop the folder up to trick people who make the assumption AutoPlay dosn't work on USB keys making it seems like nothing has happened...
USB thumb drives/flash drive can indeed autorun and be infected from a computer they are plugged into. For example Trojan.Autorun.US can autorun from a USB drive and Kavo and Win32/NSAnti.H can infect a USB drive from a computer. There are many more. Perhaps trawl a few malware removal sites.
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Trojans don't "spread". If something can replicate itself, it is a virus - not a Trojan.
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Could be a worm.
To be fair - a trojan can also be a virus or a worm. All a trojan is, is a program that does something malicious whilst pretending to be benign... the behaviour itself may be more akin to that normally associated with viruses or worms.
Security is often strongest at the perimeter so you get someone to open the door for you and then spread inside the system, that's why you have trojans launching worms.
Norton and McAfee are bloatware that slow the PC down. I agree as I've had both installed on XP and Vista Ultimate. Someone suggests NOD32, but apparently that's a bag of bollox too. So which AV are you supposed to use?
I don't fancy going back to the MS-DOS days of just running an AV scan once a week with no real time protection.
I agree, I have Avast running on an old 1.5ghz p4 (xp), a newer 2.4ghz amd (xp), an amd dual core vista prem (it came with the frame!), and a Windows Home Server and in each case, the before and after were negligible. Now my old piii... that's a different story. That thing couldn't run xp all that well, so has been my ubuntu play box and may actually become an xbmc if I get off my lazy rear. (Incidently, for the penguin fans, even Ubuntu became bloated on that machine with 7.1 had to downgrade back to 7.04 as 7.04 lasted A LOT longer on the battery, didn't tax the machine much and actually worked better overall. Yes, even linux has feature creep.
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