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October 22, 2008

Update on Possible Trojan

Folks, an update on the trojan alert I posted here a short while ago. A few people had emailed me that their antivirus apps flagged an International Monetary Fund graphic I had reposted here as possibly contained an image trojan. I took the image down, posted a note here, and began investigating.

So far, here is what I have done. I have extensively scanned systems here for trojans and viruses, with nothing showing up whatsoever. Further, I have multi-scanned the image file in question, with the following results:

Most of the scanners found nothing, but two said they had found Exploit.Win32.IMG-GIF.b in the IMF image. Note, however, that F-Secure uses the Kaspersky engine, so what we really have is one engine out of the group that found anything in the image. Given that there was nothing on my system, given the credible source (the IMF), and given that false positives are surprisingly common among virus scanners (cf., "Goddammit – It's Kaspersky again"), my current inclination is to cautiously say there is no problem here.

I have, nevertheless, done two things:

1. In a spirit of caution I am keeping the image down.
2. I have emailed the people at Kaspersky and asked them to re-check the claim of a trojan in the above image file.

I will keep people apprised.

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