Hijackthis Sold To Trendmicro

[Matt]

Quote from Merijn (HJT Developer):

As some of you might have seen several IT news websites are offering Trend Micro HijackThis 2.00 beta. An official statement will be posted on their website soon, but since this is a public beta of theirs I figured it'd be best if I answered the question I'm going to get asked a lot, right now.

This is not fake, I sold HijackThis to TrendMicro. Their product incorporates all changes, updates and fixes that I was planning on adding in the v1.99.2 release. I made sure of that and I hope no one will be disappointed with it.

While TrendMicro does not officially support HijackThis yet, I expect they will once it goes final.

I sold HijackThis because I had been sitting on an unfinished update for over a year and I still could not make enough time to finish it. My uni classes are taking up a lot of time and I want to set my goals a bit wider than just the antispyware business (though I still love it). Sitting on an unfinished product until it becomes obsolete is not useful, so I decided to transfer the responsibility to TrendMicro (who have also taken care of my CWShredder) so they can give it proper attention and support. Where the will take HijackThis, I do not know - but I am sure they will respect its goals and what it stands for.

As you might imagine, this has shaken the anti-malware community. What this means for HJT, many are unsure. TrendMicro has slapped a trademark on the tool, which raises questions about the legality of offering support across forums. TM also has a knack for taking fantastic tools and letting them fall down the drain (think CWShredder). While version 2.0 has new features and bugs that Merijn had planned to fix, it also has some serious downsides. Firstly, it has a sort of "self-analyzing" tool that compares your log results to a DB of logs that others have submitted. It seems that their theory is that if you have a line that yields a low percent result, it is bad. This assumption is absolutely false. I can only imagine how many helpless victims will try to clean themselves with this tool. Many people don't realize that just "fixing" a line in HJT won't necessarily remove the infection (actually, most of the time it won't).

If/when HJT becomes too obsolete or dysfunctional for practical purposes, a new tool may be introduced to take its place. Talk has already begun about a new tool to replace HJT; it could be something of a collaborative effort by many of the experts. The idea would be to keep a similar design, scanning similar parts of the registry, and producing a similar log. While there are currently more in-depth tools available, it is not practical to use such verbose tools for diagnostic purposes.

For the time being, HJT is still being used, and hopefully it will continue to be used in the future. You can just never tell when a good tool goes corporate...

[Besttechie]

I wrote a blog entry about it which you can find here:

HijackThis Sold To Trend Micro - The Future Of HijackThis

B

[flashh4]

Howdy BT and Matt, just wonder how this will effect the removal and cleaning of logs if TrendMicro starts selling HJT insted of being free. How it will effect us as readers ?? Since i am a new HJT reader i was needing your comments on this !!

Thanks !!

[Matt]

Hiya Flash. As of right now, TrendMicro says they do not plan to start selling the program. However, in a world of business, that could change any day. This is another reason why a replacement is already being worked on. If Trend starts selling the program, the EULA will most likely change. It would certainly reduce the number of users. I'm also willing to bet (but not sure, Jeff would know better than me) that if the program goes 'paid', it could restrict the free support that sites offer.

Right now, many people are already banking on a new, but similar tool; but HJT hasn't been thrown out either.

[flashh4]

Howdy Matt, was just reading where theres a few tools that will come close to what HJT does & that one program owner is trying to update his program to try & do the same as HJT does. So guess time will see !!

TC friend !

Chuck