Trojan with integrated Anti-Virus

Found in eWeek …

Veteran malware researcher Joe Stewart was fairly sure he’d seen it all until he started poking at the SpamThru Trojan—a piece of malware designed to send spam from an infected computer.

The Trojan, which uses peer-to-peer technology to send commands to hijacked computers, has been fitted with its own anti-virus scanner—a level of complexity and sophistication that rivals some commercial software.

Other mass-mailing software running on your botnet getting you down? Not able to maximize that bandwidth on your pwned computer? Simply download, install, patch, and use pirated anti-virus software as part of your trojan!

Much like the fight against the terrorists, the only way we can win this war is to take away the economic incentive. In the case of terrorism, as soon as we stop buying foreign oil we’ll be set. In this case, I guess when people stop buying stuff out of spam emails…