A 'Helpful' Trojan Horse?
Analysts at SophosLabs, the research arm of antivirus software vendor Sophos, have discovered a spyware-borne Trojan, dubbed Troj/Erazer-A, that seeks out and destroys movie and music files that it suspects to be illegal copies transmitted via peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks.
The Trojan looks through P2P file sharing folders, seeking out formats such as AVI, MP3, MPEG, WMV, GIF, and ZIP. When it finds these files, it wipes them out and places a copy of itself in the folder, using tempting names such as game.exe, goporn.exe, nero7.exe, and officexpcrack.exe, according to Sophos.
"The Erazer Trojan is a vigilante worthy of a Charles Bronson movie, taking the law into its own hands. However, it's perfectly possible for the Trojan to aim poorly and wipe out innocent files, too," says Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos. "Malware is not the way to fight Internet piracy."