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August 18, 2005
Supertrojan?
Sam Varghese reports that there's a new variant of a keylogging trojan out there that - according to an IT consultant - appears to be "virtually impossible to dislodge".
We're always suspicious of stories like this. In our experience, while some malware is difficult to detect and remove, it's by no means impossible, without actually reformatting the hard drive, which seems to be what the IT consultant is on the verge of doing.
We did a quick search and came up with this removal tool for instance.
Posted by cw at August 18, 2005 08:34 AM
Comments
I just read Sam's article. We've got to take the report in context. The context is that the "IT Consultant uses Windows 2003 Server as their desktop OS". So the story is IMHO, accurate but not particularly relevant to the general public.
The context stems from the old habit that nerds like and have the authorisation (i.e. Microsoft licences) to play with Server O/S on their own PC. They then decide that they can demo to clients by bringing their notebook to the presentation, run server OS and show web or application services which would not normally run on a notebook. This was both useful and "cool".
However, if you do that, you can't afford to buy any third party utils - because anti-virus, disk imaging, backup products for server OS run into the hundreds or thousands of USD rather than the 100 dollar jobs that normal pc products cost.
Since the advent of Virtual PC or VMWare and the notebook that can take 2Gb RAM / 60Gb HD, it's more rational to run a PC OS as the host and your server OS as a virtual machine. Unless you want to try out Virtual Server..drool.....
Posted by: Ananda Sim at August 18, 2005 09:29 AM