Error Error on the Wall Who’s the Foulest of Them All?
In the modern IT security world the presence of “joke” programs is uncommon, overwhelmed by an avalanche of malware motivated by financial incentives.
Recently we received such a “joke” program which did nothing more than display the offensive message box shown in the image above. We decided to detect the file as Joke/OffMsg-A due to its inappropriate content which may cause consternation amongst some. However, despite its content, the program has to be deemed to be inherently non-malicious and therefore not a Trojan.
It appears that there are still some people out there that continue to write such programs, sometimes bona fide malware, for fun/kudos, rather than pecuniary gain, as they used to do a few years ago. For example many USB worms do not appear to have an obvious monetary motive. Of course we will detect malware regardless of the sensibilities of their authors, including those allegedly written as a social good.
Posted on September 21st, 2008 by SKM, SophosLabs UKFiled under: General
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