Monday, December 20, 2004

Adware moves in the virus arena...

Adware is changing his behaviour. Adware has been compared to Trojan code for quite some time, but now we're seeing Adware behaving like a file infector. A variant of the infamous CoolWebSearch family is infecting legitimate files in a way that when the infected file gets run, the Adware file gets loaded too. This is something new. This means that you need to disinfect the legitimate file. It will be interesting to see how most anti-spyware programs will cope with this issue, as their engines aren't designed to disinfect executable files. Is this the dead of most anti-spyware programs or will it speed up the process of integration inside the real anti-virus programs?