Trojan Deletes Your Porn, Music & Warez

E. Vigilant writes "The new Trojan/Erazor-A has an interesting twist. In addition to deleting or disabling various security products and competing malware, it deletes any porn, warez and music in your P2P directories. While some opine that this trojan might have good intentions, remarkably few things infect the text files this trojan also deletes. No one yet knows who wrote this or why."

Re:I can only conclude that people at PC World ain

[d!rtyboy]

"I can only conclude that people at PC World ain't got a clue about PC's. Since when can .avi .mp3 etc etc contain virusses or malware?"

You can stick a virus in a jpeg, so I don't see why you couldn't stick one in an avi, etc. Of course, I'm not the worlds leading virus expert...

Though I do agree with the rest of your post. I was wondering why they were calling it a "vigilante" virus at all. I thought I was going a little crazy untill I read my thoughts here in the posts.

Re:Altruism? I have my doubts...

[skarphace]

bad press

Went away already.

cd recall

So they could remove the rootkit. However, their key software is still on their disks.

and class action lawsuits

Oh yeah, those are going great...

Re:I can only conclude that people at PC World ain

[skarphace]

Since when can .avi .mp3 etc etc contain virusses or malware?

Since the people making the media players haven't figured out how to properly code. It is definetly possible to get infected or compromized via a media file. Look at the whole Microsoft image rendering problem a few months ago. One look at a specially crafted image on a website and you're compromized.

Does anybody know what this is supposed to mean?

[Blakey Rat]

While some opine that this trojan might have good intentions, remarkably few things infect the text files this trojan also deletes.

I've attempted to read that sentence about a dozen times, and I have no clue what the writer's trying to say.

It's not Slashdot where the spin is!

[Anonymous Coward]

> First off, this article is pure bullshit spin. They mention several points about a virus and the whole time they attempt to spin it the reader as a "good intentions" virus--even comparing it to Charles Bronson. The Slashdot title reads "Trojan Deletes Your Porn, Music & Warez" but it doesnt, if you RTFA:

Hi. Just FYI, I wrote the article submitted to Slashdot precisely to correct this idiotic story (Slashdot should hopefully get picked up by Google, etc. and thus be more available to those who will read this). I think the writer over there was trying to find an angle on it and couldn't get past "P2P == bad, viruses == bad" so they fell back on one of the "content" industry talking points (and I use the word "content" loosely).

To anyone who has a functioning brain, the fact that it deletes your files, installs a keylogger, and disables security products (as well as a few incidental bits of competing malware) is more than enough to realize that it has only malicious intentions.

I can translate that for you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, I wrote this Slashdot submission:

> remarkably few things infect the text files this trojan also deletes.

It's there to counter the assertion in TFA that this trojan is a "good" thing because it deletes files that might infect you. In other words, it's there to point out that this trojan is completely malicious--something obvious to all Slashdotters, but which seems to have eluded the writer of TFA.

Re:Avarice

[1u3hr]

What's more, why porn? Music - RIAA would love to attack P2P music services. Movies - substitue MPAA for RIAA and the same applies. Warez, you got the BSA... But who the heck cares about porn?

I note that stupid as the article in PC World was, that the Slashdot editors went one better. PCW didn't even mention "porn" or "warez" in TFA.

The trojan deletes ANY FILES it finds in various standard locations used to share files by P2P. As for "attacking malware"; more anthropomorphic fantasy. If anyone has actually put malware into mp3 or mpeg files I haven't heard of it.

Re:Altruism? I have my doubts...

[iamlucky13]

Dude, people didn't even listen when the blaster worm came out with its bug that would give a 60 second warning before shutting down the computer. We tried to explain to them what was going on, why they needed an AV suite, why they needed to run Windows Update, and why they shouldn't click on popups and stuff, and they ignored it. I was still removing blaster occasionally from people's computers 2 years after Microsoft released the patch. There were people who would ask what all the fuss was about, to whom I would explain, including about how the virus made your computer shut down for no reason, and a week later they would call me up asking if I could figure out why their computer shut down at 2 PM every day. My words went in one ear and out the other. There were people who's systems I reformatted to get rid of blaster, set Windows update to automatic, and installed AVG. Sure enough, give 'em just two or three weeks and they either downloaded an infected file or opened up an unprotected network share (something else I told them not to do).

A message saying "You been haxored, grow a brain" would just get a "Whatever, my computer still works moron" response (or better yet, "but the Norton scan came up clean..."). If shutting down while a student was typing a paper due the next day (and hadn't saved yet) didn't inspire a little bit of sensibility, I seriously doubt deleting a few music files will. Especially since most users definitely seem to be shifting away from P2P in favor of legal music sources, and probably wouldn't have much targeted by this trojan.

Crusading against pornography and file-sharing seems far more likely.