Trojan force
Vinny Gullotto – the GM of Microsoft’s malware protection centre – has spoken to HEXUS.channel to warn of the unrelenting threat still posed by adware, Trojans and Trojan downloaders.
Very loosely, adware gets its name from being a piece of advertising software that is often automatically downloaded alongside some other piece of software. In malware terms it can be used to track user behaviour and report this back to the owner of the adware.
Trojans, as the name (derived from Trojan Horse) implies, are also applications that are sneakily installed onto a PC on the back of other downloads. The distinction is presumably that they have nothing do so with advertising and are just always nasty.
Anyway, Gullotto told us that Microsoft has unique access to data on this kind of thing because…it’s Microsoft. Apparently up to half a billion PC-users worldwide ‘opt in’ to share data via two schemes.
One is MSRT (malicious software removal tool) that tend to appear around once per month on ‘patch Tuesday’ and actively looks for horrid stuff. The other is Defender, which is more passive and intercepts things like adware, spyware and so on.
Apparently, 80 percent of the nasties identified by Defender are adware/Trojan type things, with adware alone constituting the majority of those. He also pointed out that a lot of adware has been admitted to the host PC as part of the EULA that we all agree to, but none of us read, when we download the software we want.
Pressed on what we can do about it, Gullotto’s response echoed that of the rest of the show: make sure you’re protected. To be fair, he didn’t try to promote Microsoft One Care much, although he did point out that there is 90 percent less malware cropping up on Vista than on XP.
Here is Vinny Gullotto talking to HEXUS.channel.
