Trojans infect 2.6 million systems, looking for gamer credentials

Mike Bantick
Wednesday, 25 June 2008 11:56

Your IT - Home IT

Asian countries such as China, Taiwan and Korea where the MMORPG game Lineage is popular accounted for around 900,000 infected machines, whilst Spain accounted for 235,000 and the U.S came in with 213,000 machines.

With downloads of the removal tool at around 330 million, based on the above figures the infection rate percentage is rather alarming.

Apart from donning the required aluminium hat, Microsoft’s McCormack advises Windows owners to ensure they are.. “Running an up-to-date anti-virus solution is a good start. Running an up-to-date, patched browser is another necessity – many of the Win32/Frethog trojans are installed via browser exploits (there have been instances in the past of links to malicious sites being posted to popular gaming forums – so be wary!). Enabling Automatic Updates helps a whole bunch too.”

“Disabling the Explorer ‘autoplay’ feature is useful in helping to avoid these problems. In Vista it’s easily done via the Control Panel. On Pre-Vista OS’ (if you’re admin) you can disable it globally by running ‘gpedit.msc’ -> administrative templates -> System”