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Well continuing my review of ‘integrated security solutions’ I have once again become dismayed by the terrible offerings by the various security vendors out there.

Today we don’t have massive virus outbreaks, nor do we even have a big problem with Trojans (except when it comes to malware) and worms are even starting to slow down. We can thank enterprise scale solutions and active monitoring of networks for this. Yes, even email/spam solutions are stopping many of these things right at the server at our ISP, so very little should be getting into our machines today, unlike just a couple years ago when ISP’s were leaving each of us to our own solutions.

Today, malware in the form of ADWARE and SPYWARE, as well as BOTNETS and ROOTKITS are our big challenge, and in many of these that we encounter tend to not be detected in many products until they are discovered. In my mind this does not provide a solution but a clean up.

So I don’t recommend people who are pro-active to buy these ‘Internet Security’ solutions that the vendors are pumping. They are just no good and a waste of CPU time.

F-Secure’s offering is probably the worst I’ve encountered to date. But like many of these packages, they taunt you with a free trial offering, which seems to work pretty good.

F-Secure offers the same as every other package, Anti-Virus, Anti-Spam, Firewall, as well as malware detection and a rudimentary rootkit check tool. Let’s start at the top.

The anti-virus solution is definitely the best of the inclusions with this product. When it updated that is. Our biggest challenge was getting this product to work through a proxy. Seems the F-Secure developers don’t comprehend proxies and the awesome solutions they provide, and many times our updates would never get downloaded. An Anti-Virus product is only as good as it’s updates, and we constantly had to fiddle with the settings to do a simple update. Pathetic. So we would just as soon use Avast for FREE which does not seem to have a problem with proxies.

The anti-spam solution was incredibly poor however causing several minutes of delays in processing email from nearly every ISP I tested this with. A normal POP session usually takes about 1 minute and about 10 seconds per email on the slow side. With F-Secure Anti-spam this increased ten fold. We were easily waiting about a minute per email, causing us to go for coffee every time we checked email. Since we use spam-assassin on our free servers and a very pricey solution for our Microsoft exchange server, we really don’t need anti-spam. It was no better at detecting the stuff that made it through these tools so it was simply wasting time.

The firewall was the worst of the bunch. First problem we encountered was one of our test boxes had NVideo Forceware Network Access Manager already installed. This is a firmware based firewall, and it works very well. The downside was that F-Secure Internet Security refused to install “anything” with this product installed. In this box we simply wanted to test the anti-virus and anti-spam solutions but we were forced to install the firewall product also. Trying to disable the firewall and reinstall NAM was ok, and thankfully NAM remembered are old settings saving us more time. Not F-Secure!

Once everyhting was installed in this box, we found out we could no longer access our network shares. Yes F-Secure firewall was blocking these accesses. Adding rules to allow this traffic made no difference. Isn’t a firewall made to configure what “I” want, not what some dork developer wants? I guess not. Nothing we could do (short of disabling the firewall) would allow us access to our network shares again.

The rootkit checker was bland. Featureless, did not detect 22 of our suspicious ADS streams and did not provide any output that could be used to track and discover where potential problems could be. The average person does not understand rootkits enough to be able to troubleshoot this without a lot of hand holding, and this tool has none of that available. Eeye’s BLINK was better for this yet even it was an ineffective tool at current rootkits. Old and very public rootkit technology was noted effectively, but most of the problems these days are botnet driven and none of these were detectable until infection occured and the OS was exploited. Then the anti-virus solution did it’s job.

The anti-malware portion of this software was very paranoid and kept advising us of tools that it didn’t think the average PC should have, like netcat or nmap, even PE builder tools were quarantined by F-Secure which annoyed me to no end. Sure one could build exceptions but shouldn’t the tool ask this during detection, not AFTERWARDS? Barts PE builder broke thanks to F-Secure’s gross paranoia. Perhaps they should devise a color coding like DHS has for terrorist alerts, ah never mind, they’d all be red…

The kicker was purchasing a license and getting technical support. I had to send two emails to get my license since they didn’t bother sending it automatically as part of the order. Very irritating to have to ask after a week of buying a license where it is.

The next kicker was contacting support about our two major issues. Updates and our firewall problems. Neither were addressed in a satisfactory manner. We were advised to disable proxies for updates. Ok, not a big deal but every week this needed to be changed since it seemed to forget the settings. As a consequence we were hardly up to date. This should be automatic and not require tweaking internet settings just to update so we fail this product on this point alone. The other components had very few updates (some never updated in the two months we used this product) so we wonder how effective a solution is if it is never updated. Snort rules for instance are updated almost every day, and they haven’t come close to detecting everything yet, so if I have a choice I’ll stick to a real IDS solution and not the ‘cleanup’ proposed by F-Secure.

Technical support was terrible also. Three phone calls to them and after explaining my problem to some fellow who speaks very poor English, he would offer to ‘email’ me a solution. I think he simply could not grasp the English alphabet over the phone when I tried to spell my email address since on all three occasions I never received an email from him. By phone call#4 I asked if he could simply walk me through this on the phone. He refused and insisted to email it. I then asked if he really was a technical support person? He said yes. I asked if he could REALLY help with my problem or if he didn’t have a clue how to fix my firewall/proxy solutions? He said he could. So I told him that I want him to help me now on the phone. He hesitates, but otherwise agreed..

F-Secure — you call that support? I call that very disappointing and disrespectful of your clients when you continually waste there time. Secondly, get people who can speak English. Make it a requirement of the job for those who prefer to get support in english.

After talking to this guy for about 20 minutes and following his instructions I was able to ‘one time’ update the package (I had to repeat his instructions every time I needed an update), but my firewall issue was not finding a solution. Even with rules in place (confirming I had indeed set them up correctly, but it still didn’t work) with the fellow from technical support still did not lead me to a working solution. I asked if there was a way to remove the firewall component completely. The tech stated I would have to download the Anti-virus program alone to accomplish this. I did not have a license for that product so I would have to buy another product to do this.

At this point I simply stated this product was ineffective and I requested a refund. This the tech support fellow was able to do very quickly, and in minutes I had a email in my inbox to confirm this.

This was the best performance I received from F-Secure.

My suggestion for you considering this ‘integrated solution’ Save your money and just buy the Anti-Virus product alone. IT’s the only thing worth any money, provided you don’t have any proxies to affect your updates.My suggestion was to stick with Avast anti-virus, which does most of this stuff for free and much more effectively.

My rating of this product is 1 out of 10. This should not even be out of beta, but getting a refund was no trouble.

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Like most folks these days I presume, you typically scan your computer either daily or weekly using a Anti-Virus program.  You also probably run cleanmgr.exe routinely to clean up your drives from junk and temp files.  You probably use some kind of firewall on the PC.  You probably also then use some kind of spyware product also.

I’ve become very disappointed with most spyware/adware products these days.  They are simply either ineffective or too paranoid.  Neither is an effective solution.  The industry leading Webroot is probably the most balanced on the market today, but it’s updating is making it ineffective when a outbreak occurs.  I for one will not buy a product that doesn’t effectively update its database constantly.  This is a big job and why I think it’s worth the money to spend on a solution, ONLY if it stays up to date. 

For a free solution you can always turn to SpyBot and Ad-aware SE.  Both these tools can be had for no cost stay ”reasonably” up to date, if not as current as some of the non-free products.  However every day one see’s a new product coming out claiming to be the latest and greatest. 

In order to get the most effective detection capabilities I think one needs to run the anti-spyware using a central repository that is constantly updated and does not require ”downloading” to update, or does so with the latest (built hourly) rules.

I have tried out Trend Micro Anti-Spyware Online Scan and will provide you with a step by step usage.

Using Trend Micro Online Scan

This is a very easy process.  The first thing you’ll obviously need is a PC connected to the Internet and to be running Internet Explorer v6.01 or greater to use the ActiveX component.

I tried it with Firefox using the ”IE Tab” extension, which worked fine, and also with the ”Open in IE” extension, which also worked fine.  Obviously the latter actually spawns IE, where the former simply opens a window within the firefox chrome.  If you don’t understand all this, don’t worry.  It works.

So, next you go to the link I provided above and allow the web site to install the ActiveX component which downloads the executable to perform the update and scan.

Once you get the executable running it will then update it’s rules from the repository at trend micro and start scanning.

Now we wait until it’s done.  The final result is noted by this screenshot we took:

From here we would have taken a very serious glance at the machine itself, if it wasn”t for the simple facts.

1.  This PC has Avast AV running, Scanned before detected nothing.
2.  This PC also has Tiny PF 2005 installed, and could not verify any infection directly or indirectly.
3.  We don’t know what it exactly found that was the problem.
So we take a closer look at the details that Trend Micro found, and this was the screenshot:


Taking a closer look would again give us indication that our box is owned.  But a few of these items are not a total surprise as far as the findings, the others are just lacking any real detail.
So we click on the ”Threat Details” link at the bottom for a select item such as this keyfinder.  Unfortunately the ”Detail” is rather pathetic.

 


 

As you can see for yourself this doesn’t tell us anything, and doesn’t confirm what we’ve found.  So I decide to submit these ”positives” to virus.com for testing against the worlds top AV programs.

First though, lets just double check it against our machines Avast AV:

Nothing. Well lets just make 100% sure.

 

 

As I was able to verify NONE OF THE ”POSITIVES DETECTED BY TREND MICRO ANTI-SPYWARE were legit.  Most of them in fact would have been cleaned and then rendered numerous software packages unusable.  The ONLY agreement with Trend Micro was noted in this screenshot below.  No other files were tested positive.

This is not an acceptable tool for any ”type” of detection and certainly not acceptable as a cleaner. 

I would not consider this tool to be ”beta” quality.  You are better off running NOTHING than this software.

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Well everyone needs an antivirus solution don’t they?

 

No.  I don’t believe everyone NEEDS one anymore.  To be truly effective you will probably need two or three, but good luck running them all together.  Its not recommended, and you will probably have real issues.

As a consequence even software designers are realizing this and integrating their AV solution into a more comprehensive and complete solution, bringing other features that should not be part of a pure anti-virus solution.

 

Let me state some declarations for the security vendors out there who may read this.

First declaration.  We don’t want “vendor-specific” integrated solutions.  Period.  Anyone who thinks they do can email me directly or on the forums and we can discuss it. 

Second declaration.  No AV/Security Vendor has a ‘good’ integrated solution let alone a ‘excellent’ one.

Third declaration.  Stay out of endeavors unless your going to do them well.

Now even some AV products are moving into integrating other ‘features’ into their software.  Kaspersky v6 Beta is one of those.  This was supposed to be a pure Anti-Virus program but as I highlight it isn’t.

 

Since this is an article about my last 24 hours with this program I shall try not to pick on integrated solutions any more. 

Why I don’t believe you need AV products anymore?

Truthfully virus’ are very very rare forms of malware these days.  They are making a bit of a comeback but mostly as rebuilt worms or trojans.  Worms and trojans are the big purveyors of nasty malware, and of course spam, phishing etc are even larger spreaders of the disease, BUT they are not virus either. 

 

So Anti-virus products simply waste resources and offer little to no actual protection?

Exactly.  Almost none are capable of “true” real-time protection unless you are being infected with very old malware.  However this is really where the value in Anti-virus software is.  Typically the value comes into play only after you discover that your already infected. [1]  Sure none of us like this, and we wish we would never get infected but it happens.  Our AV solution typically works good to excellent at removing and cleaning ‘known’ infections.  Sure, sometimes we need to do more than scan, quarantine, and delete, but our investment in the AV program should be able to assist at weeding out the ‘known’ malware and ensuring our data is clean. 

Only in the know…

It doesn’t stop unknown virus’.  Hence why you need to keep updating your software with new ‘signatures’ and additionally keep scanning your systems to keep up to date with what’s ‘known’.

Anti-virus software tends to be excellent at dealing with virus, pretty good at trojans and worms, but ‘only’ if the signature is up to date.  Besides nobody trades floppy disks much anymore so boot sector virus’ are dying out as malware matures in new forms[2].  So the AV product typically cannot stop trojans or worms from moving around, unless it has detection signatures for it.  But these definitely are acquired after the trojan or worm has typically ran it’s course.  Some worms have lifetimes in seconds.  How do you detect it, report it, confirm it, publish it, add it, update it, scan it all in a few seconds?  You can’t.  You would be infected during that phase with no trigger from your AV software.  

Since I don’t need to waste time and money getting little return on investment I choose not to install Anti-Virus tools.  Regardless of the solution though remember, “true” real time protection comes at a cost to performance.  On a home PC who wants to give up performance?  On a gaming machine, no WAY your giving up performance.  So don’t waste your time installing this software on these machines.  There are better solutions. 

Isn’t Kaspersky Anti-Virus v6 Beta different?

Yes.  Kaspersky v6 Beta was downloaded as I have always heard good things about this company and they tend to get fairly favorable reviews.  However most people hated v5 for a variety of reasons and I was led to believe (reading other reviews) that 6 was like a phoenix from the ashes type of release compared to v5.  It wasn’t.  It’s very like 5 and add new features you may love, but I guess you won’t, I sure didn’t.

From the beginning

Well the MSI installer was the first strike against this product. I’m no fan of the MSI installer, it creates numerous difficulties at installing software, and there should NEVER be a PROBLEM installing software. If there is, you shouldn’t have released it with the problem.

 

I attempted the installer on Vista RC2 and it completely failed with no real error (unknown error, didn’t I just type this…).  I then attempted to install this on a XP SP2 box I use that has ‘never’ seen an Anti-virus product before, and has been running for 6 months.  This installed fine requiring a reboot at the end.  However it attempted to update during the install, and this simply caused a hangup of both the installer and windows explorer.  I wasn’t impressed.  The reason for this hanging will be clear in a minute.

 

After a successful reboot, the software came up and started flagging various dll’s mostly, with nice smallish yellow popups,  and asking me what I wanted to do.  Folks, this is like many MANY other products out there, most are firewall solutions, but a few call themselves Anti-Virus solutions.   Now with all these packages the capabilities are morphing also.  Its an application tracking program that shows hooks into system routines, accesses and injections and changes of course.  This can be a very powerful tool to ensuring you stay protected.  However this!?!?!? In an AV product?  Give me a break.  Someone forgot to tell these folks ‘I only want my AV software bothering me IF IT’S A VIRUS OR OTHER MALWARE!!!!!!!’, we do need to remind them.

Why is this a problem?

I expect my anti-virus tool to ‘detect’ virus’.  Not tell me every little thing going on inside my system.  If I wanted an effective tool for active malware discovery I would use a serious appliance built for that purpose.  Maybe  the Anti-virus software guys and gals want to detect 0-days, something they never have done in the entire history of anti-virus tools.  Great lofty goal, but then they break trusted processes (detecting and removing virus’) with new features that can misplace trust, and then all bets are off.

So, question is.  Do I really want this level of protection?  Maybe. 

Do I want it from a trusted application like an anti-virus tool?

No, since they don’t know whether it’s malware or not, it asks you to make the decision.  I’m not sure if this would have an effect on scanning files against known attacks but I’m not about to either guess or take a chance.  Of course in my case I’m sure this is all innocent routine stuff, but it’s being treated inappropriately by Kaspersky so it’s possible one can make bad decisions.

 

Every little task generates this ‘alertwindow’ providing you only with:

 

A:  The classification of the alert;

B:  The location of the file causing the alert.

Then you have to make decisions as to:

C:  Whether to accept or deny it;

D:  Whether to make the above choice permanent, or just this time;

E:  Whether to simply trust this application to do what it wants, or not.

 

Lets look at each of these in more detail.

 

A:  The classification is a single word.  “Invader”  “Downloader”  “Threat”.  You can click on it to go to http://www.viruslist.com and check the definition in the encyclopedia, but don’t waste your time.   The definition you probably already formed in your head is more accurate and descriptive.

 

B:  The location is helpful, but in no way assists in decision making.  Does the software ‘belong’ there?  Are there other files called this also?  What is the manufacturers version information from the file?  Do we have a MD5 or SHA hash to verify it’s integrity?  Is this an essential windows file or not?  Is it a virus because my AV program displayed it to me?  Too many questions still and no definitive answers from the program that’s supposed to be definitive.

 

C:  Whether to
accept or deny this activity.  How am I supposed to make an intelligent decision based on the little panic information I have received so far?  Honestly you can’t.  So you flip a coin.  However chances are something ‘legit’ was trying to do something and if you deny it, very likely the application will now no longer have any communication back to the system including the calls and threads it already created and will typically crash the application or worse the desktop, or sadly, the entire machine.  So, the default choice is to accept it.  Why bother me then? 

 

D:  Now we have to make a choice that we will have to live with if we ever run this again.  Again same logic trail as C: above, so same conclusion.  Why bother me then?

 

E:  Should we just ‘trust’ this application to do what it wants? Now here’s the ‘stop annoying me’ choice, we can tell the program “look you annoying software, quit bugging me with popups and just trust the blasted application”.  Still we don’t know whether this is our photo gallery we wanted to start up to add some pictures from the weekend, or the latest worm/trojan file deletion tool.  But we can trust it and never hear from Kaspersky again. 

 

So the conclusion, this behavior from Kaspersky isn’t warranted or desired in an AV product because it doesn’t provide decent support.  It simply gives the user very powerful filtering capability which one can most simply avoid, and probably will.  This type of processing smacks of ‘host intrusion prevention systems (HIPS)’ but these are typically poor or overly complex applications.  Here with Kaspersky AV v6 Beta we have not overcome that hallmark.

 

The second contention I have with Kaspersky AV v6 Beta, is all the links direct one to a page to download the ‘trial version’ from, but with no way to activate the ‘trial version’.  The docs indicate that the activation tool (help -> activate) allows one to buy a license for this or activate later, or activate with a trial code.  Well the ‘trial version’ I downloaded from the ‘trial page’ does not have a ‘activate with trial code’ option.  So it’s either no updates or buy a license.  Well lets see how it does with it’s current database on my box that has never seen a anti-virus tool.  Aha, this is why my install hung up, it won’t allow the updater to update.  How silly.

 

Ok, I start the scan and I do like some of the options it provides like showing you all the exploits at theo >end f the scan.  I like this.  So, I run the scan, it estimates about two hours to scan everything (lots of partitions) and unbelievably it was done in just under two hours.  Very impressive.  Two little things I have seen before but they actually work as expected.  Wow.  It’s truly unfortunate that little else worked as great or made a positive lasting impression on me.

 

Remember we scanned a box that has XP SP2 installed patched semi regular (I let it inform and download, but I install manually) basis, no firewall except windows firewall, no antivirus ever until Kaspersky v6 Beta was installed, This has office 2003 installed runs Outlook as the mail client, has perl installed, IRC runs constantly, and most web browsing is done from this box, including this report being initially typed on it.

 

After a full two hour scan of my box I found one ‘threat’ on my PC.  Oh, that’s darn good I say to myself.  Just one file.  Considering some of the PC’s people have brought to me that I’ve cleaned up, repaired and rebuilt over the years, typically finding unbelievable amounts of malware  or a simple single infection still resulting in numerous files found during a scan.  Just one file infected.  Must have contained it…

So what one did I have?  I clicked on the result and was shocked.  The result was ‘Not-a-virus:mirc-616.exe’.  I couldn’t believe this.  It was showing me a backup copy of MIRC from my last update.  Hey I use MIRC daily, and rely upon it.  I bought the tool so I’m licensed, and when it did an upgrade it created a backup first.  How intelligent. 

So why is Kaspersky bugging me about this innocent tool?

 

I guess someone could ‘run’ it and take advantage of the exploits to infect my box, so I deleted it afterwards.  Was it infected?  No.  Why does it flag me with a bunch of insignificant warnings when it’s harmless?  Why did it not say ‘look you should delete this old version or upgrade if this is the current version you are using’?  Because it’s not a patch management solution, nor is it an auditing solution.  So I cannot fathom why my Anti-Virus software is behaving like one. 

 

Maybe it’s trying to be more encompassing and deal with the latest threats, rootkits.   But then shouldn’t it promote itself as an anti-rootkit tool?   Well we all know that there isn’t any such thing (yes many are trying to build one, but nothing actually works in detection), even tools such as ‘Rootkit Revealer’ by F-secure simply tell you a bunch of stuff that may ‘look’ like a rootkit, but you’ll have to do much more system analysis to determine for real or not.

 

Lets do some work

So, I figure I’ll wait and see if I can get the 30 day activation code to use this product, check around to ensure I haven’t missed something in terms of getting the proper beta product.  In my travels I find this great RAR file I want to download.  Ok firefox causes numerous popups in Kaspersky as DLL’s are loaded to process the download.  Ok I get the download and click on open in my download window in firefox, get more including AdobeIEsomethingorother.dll I can’t see why it needs this and select deny.  Windows Explorer crashes.  Ooops.  Attempt to repeat, crashes again.  Turns out that the download window launches in explorer.exe space and any time it looks up how to handle extensions several dlls are loaded for that purpose, including the AdobeIEsomethingorother.dll that I denied.  I wasn’t running IE or Adobe, but Windows Explorer (explorer.exe) required it during it’s initialization and denying it made it quite unstable.

 

Ok, this is not why I have security products installed on my machines.  I install them to:

 

A:  Improve the security of my systems, and improve my ability to do said;

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B:  Improve the stability and reliability of my systems and the data that resides on them

C:  To protect and ensure the accuracy and validity and privacy of the data and software that resides on the machines.

 

If the software I’m installing/using interferes with ONE of those conditions it fails and gets removed.

 

Kaspersky failed on the first two accounts.  It did not improve my security, and it destabilized my system by halting processes in stream to popup windows.  This regularly caused issues and in some cases fails, or crashes or unrecoverable applications.  In one case it completely crashed my TCP/IP stack since the protocol doesn’t like waiting for responses.  As for the third I can say the installation/removal of the software did not adversely affect any system files.  It did not interfere with the accuracy of the files that presided, nor did it interfere with them (outside of the routine application issues)

 

I could not recommend this product since:

 

1. It misleads the user about particular findings
2. Activation was a major headache with no immediate solution attainable
3. The product introduces so many additional points of failure that system stability could be a factor
4. It wastes the users time with notices of things that are innocent additionally it doesn’t make notice of important things.
5. Misuse of the tool by the user can render a machine or application useless.  Even to the point of crashing system kernel routines.

 

In my opinion this Anti-virus product is only 1/5th of it’s capabilities, and I was not seeking integrated solutions.  Since the AV portion does seem to work effectively it alerts you to non-virus files, which could cause one to delete something they use accidentally.

Installation Ranking: 3/5 – Using MSI and saying it installs on all windows but would not on Vista nor would it generate a decent error.  XP works fine.

Initial Setup and Patching: 1/5 – Unable to do anything except hang the machine attempting to make connections the
program blocks.  Unable to recify within test period, granted it was very short, so we give it a one.

Usability: 3/5 – Overall the program worked as we expected and did not cause issues or confusion when we asked it to do things.  It was not so clear when it prompted you with popups about app activity.

Dependability: 3/5 – Overall it’s engine scanned effectively and found all the planted malware on our test box.  It’s discovery of non-malware as malware concerned me greatly about it’s ‘cry wolf’ potential.  I would not rely on results singularily by this software I would have to confirm them with another more reliable package to ensure it is accurately determining valid malware, and not potential malware. 

Overall score: 2.5/5 – Software adequate.  Price to purchase unrealistic to it’s abilities.  Certainly has potential as a combo AV-Application Watcher, but why?

I don’t want to have to second guess my results, my AV software shouldn’t either.  If it does then it no longer has any ability to do what AV software is supposed to do….detect.

 

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[1]This happens as a result (typically) by being infected during the ‘unknown’ phase, and once the signatures were updated, you now ‘detect’ the infection running around doing whatever it wants until now.

[2]Traditionally you got virus from copying files usually from a floppy disk.  Over time as other file transfer methods developed, the ways for virus to spread changed also.  However malware creators also realized that in order to get the virus around, they needed to figure out how to spread it.  Email, news, IRC protocals were used and the development of hiding virus in (even legit) programs was developed, now commonly referred to as trojans or trojan horses.  Worms also are an effective spreader technology since it’s whole concept in life is to move around the internet.

Hot:

If you have not heard of Blackmal, or taken precautions against this very deadly piece of Malware then you have not been paying attention to the security forums this week. 

There are many names for this depending on who your Anti-Virus vendor is.

Check out the details.

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What’s in a name.

If you have trouble with the name of this particular malware check out CME.mitre.org for a better listing.  There are several other names this goes by, but importantly is how to take precautions NOW about this.  I personally think this says more about the person who came up with this name.

Methods of Infection

Email or P2P share are the typical delivery methods reported.  So this means checking all files as they come in, or isolating them and checking them prior to downloading them.  Don’t chance anything, and if it’s packed, unpack it.  The typical malware is packed with UPX in this case.

It will connect to any network shares and copy itself to these locations:

\Admin$\WINZIP_TMP.exe
\c$\WINZIP_TMP.exe
\c$\Documents and Settings\All
Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\WinZip Quick Pick.exe

OS affected

Any Windows OS.

Methods of Prevention

Other than keeping your Anti-Virus program up to date, and checking tonight for updates, you can also not process any emails directly into your mail program.  Instead pre-filter them before you download them.  You may lose a mail or two, but that is better than the alternative; losing system files, and not being able to reboot properly.

When it comes to P2P, just don’t do it.  I’m sure you can slow down for a couple days until this gets full wind and your anti-virus will be able to detect it properly.  If not oh well, I guess a rebuild isn’t such a bad idea then.
\r

 

Risk Level

Moderate.  It’s very high as far as destructiveness is concerned, but is easily avoidable by keeping your software and OS up to date. 

If you have any comments or questions use our forum, or post your comments below.

 

Links:

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Blackmal
Malware
listing