HijackThis has been sold to TrendMicro

[PhilliePhan]

March 12, 2007

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.

merijn.org

[Gizmokid2005]

......interesting.....

[cauzomb]

sht! trendmicro's one of the "TEAM" of 3rd party software companies that give free fix your sht online applications n stuff like that... The ones that leave the door open for privacy violation, you can see the list of companies at microsofts websites. Now Hijack this isn't going to be reporting "certain" things......... corupted moneygrubber privacy violators..

[PhilliePhan]

Now Hijack this isn't going to be reporting "certain" things......... corupted moneygrubber privacy violators..

I am a bit aprehensive myself, though I figure most of the improvements will be ones Merijn was planning to add.

HJT has always used whitelists - don't want to speculate as to whether Trend will abuse them by adding "iffy" items....

You can get around this with this command: hijackthis.exe /ihatewhitelists

Interesting to see if that holds for v2.0.

We are, though, getting to a point where HJT has become less of an "analysis" tool and more a "fix" tool (IMO )
Tools such as WinPFind2 and combofix offer a better view of an infected machine, but HJT enables users to fix items (that it is able to "see") more quickly and with less effort than, say, a registry patch....