back to article 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 …

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  1. Dr. Vesselin Bontchev
    Boffin

    Technical errors

    "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.

  2. Eponymous Cowherd

    Geriatric slugs

    ***"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.

  3. Mark
    Gates Horns

    IT'S ME!!! I'M THE TROJAN!!

    And i'm making my way to your XBox 360 soon! Dressed as a giant condom!

    Mwahahahaaaa I shall have my revenge.

    xx

  4. James Thomas

    Practice safe computing!

    Wear a rubber when you're downloading a crack kids!

  5. Jack Harrer
    Thumb Down

    Re: Geriatric slugs

    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!

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    No Downloads 32?

    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.

  7. Chris Harden
    Flame

    @Dr. Vesselin Bontchev

    ""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...

  8. heystoopid
    Thumb Up

    Or

    Or is it the same honey pot machine that keeps getting reinfected ?

  9. Andy Turner
    Thumb Up

    Avoid the big box AV

    IME, the Nortons of this world are the big memory/CPU hogs, but I too give the thumbs up to Nod32. IT's quiet and with a small footprint.

  10. ilago

    @ Dr. Vesselin Bontchev

    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.

  11. Brian

    Lineage what?

    Come on.. for the little media coverage that my favourite MMORPG gets, at least get it's name correct!

  12. Chris Cheale

    pedantry

    ----

    Trojans don't "spread". If something can replicate itself, it is a virus - not a Trojan.

    ----

    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.

  13. Galaxy Bob

    So which is it?

    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.

  14. pctechxp

    use Avast!

    Which dynamically loads and unloads the scanning components as needed

  15. soaklord

    @ pctechxp

    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.

  16. Tim
    Coat

    It's targeting people who download WoW cracks....

    shouldn't they be warning people to beware of geeks bearing gifts?

    Mine's the one with the picture of Helen O'Loy in the pocket...

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