Lots of pundits point out that the antivirus/firewall/antispyware companies are making big profits from the fear instilled in computer users the world over. Whether every threat is real or not, who’s got the guts to go out into the cyber world unprotected these days, or even plugin in someone else’s USB key for all that.
Now, it seems a Trojan horse program has surfaced that looks rather suspiciously like a goody-two-shoes kind of application. Rather than handing over access to your hard drive to the nearest script kiddy, opening ports to every electronic eavesdropper, and emailing itself to all your business contacts complete with some salacious come on, this little critter simply deletes all the porn, p2p shared files, and eradicates warez from your computer. It’s almost as if, could it possibly be, a puritanical application created with the sole intent of cleaning up the net?
The clever guys at Sophos have dubbed this latest threat to geek sanity “trojerazera” (like Trokan melded to Kazaa I guess)
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/trojerazera.html
It also goes by the name of TROJ_P2PCOPY.A, Trojan.Win32.Eraser.a, Erazor, and Troj/Erazer-A.
If you’re desperate to retain your collection of electronic smut, don’t fancy losing all those painstakingly downloaded illegal copies of software package, and are hoping to hang on to your p2p-shared folders just long enough for the RIAA to find you, then download the latest update for your antivirus software and do a detailed trojerazera eraser job.