CoolWebSearch Is Winning Trojan War

The Register: CoolWebSearch is winning Trojan war

Merijn Bellekom has abandoned developing software that removes one of the nastiest browser hijackers on the planet: CoolWebSearch, a trojan that converts your PC into a source of revenue for fly-by-night porn sites not capable of generating legitimate Web traffic.

Bellekom has just released the latest version of his CWShredder (1.59), the only antidote to the trojan, but warns that his app won't be updated again: "I have a few bugs to fix, but after that there's not much left to do. I simply do not have the tools to remove the latest variants. They are too aggressive or too complicated to allow for automated removal."

He has tracked CWS and its modifications ever since it first appeared last summer, claiming that it is "the most complex, invisible and devious hijacker" ever programmed.

Fighting CoolWebSearch has become a daunting task. The criminals behind it often engage in Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against sites that host CWShredder. Some variants try to cripple CWShredder and other spyware removal tools. New versions of CWS are released almost every few weeks. Bellekom's chronicle of variants pretty much reads like a horror story. Merijn calls the latest variants "a living hell".