Trojans

Overheard - Firefox wins No. 1 spot for critical vulnerabilities

Bit9’s come out with their list of 2008’s Popular Applications with Critical Vulnerabilities. Top of the list? Mozilla Firefox.  Is IE even on the list? Nope.

This caught my attention because I’m just about to FedEx back my old hard drive so it can be wiped clean and reformatted. You see, I was hit by the Backdoor.Tidserv Trojan and it shut me down in about ten minutes.

As soon as my Symantec warning came up, I shut down and rebooted in safe mode. The tricky little Trojan told me (usuing its Symantec voice) that I had successfully cleaned up, but it was lying. When I started back up, I was in pop-up city. Another shut-down and scan told my computer that a Trojan was found and quarantined.  Again, it was lying. What the Trojan was doing was shutting me down a little bit more each time I ran a virus scan. After about five scans,  I was toast.

My 2009 resolution? Remove Firefox.

Overheard: Using government Trojans to catch terrorists

The German Pirate Party just published some internal documents that show how Bavarian crime fighters want to get around Skype’s VOIP encryption: The plan is to trick suspects into installing trojan-like malware on their PCs that then captures Skype phone calls and forwards them to a remote server. Janko Roettgers, Bavarian police wants to use trojan malware to eavesdrop on Skype phone calls

On a related note, the U.S. government wants total access to Google search records.