Viruses and Trojans in Trusted Downloads

by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Recently – though I never gave it a thought before and I did not have any anti-virus program check it – Bitdefender v10 FREE found in an ISO image help on my external hard drive a Trojan.

The ISO was for the OPEN CD 7.04 (both ISO and cut CD have now been destroyed) and came via a direct download from the official website.

This could only mean one of two things, I believe, and that is that either there is, or has been, at time of my download, infection on the site or two that there is a Trojan, according to BitDefender, embedded in the CD, in one of the programs.

Although few of us will ever think this necessary I would suggest – and I shall be one to follow my own advice this time for a change – that everyone always save any download to desktop and then check anything for hidden dangers and pitfalls prior to actually installing anything on the PC. Anything that cannot be saved to disk but wants to force install should be considered suspect, even if from a supposedly reputable source, and left well alone.

I am glad to say that I never actually installed anything from that particular OPEN CD – though I love OPEN CD in general – and therefore never actually had the Trojan let loose on my system.

Let the user beware!

© M Smith (Veshengro), June 2008