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| Merijn
Bellekom is the creator of the infamous HijackThis
application.
HijackThis is a tool commonly used in mostly all the
Anti-Malware forums for analyzing logs of infected systems and removing the
infections. There are numerous number of Anti-Malware forums and
websites that help users to get rid of Malwares and other
unwanted applications from their system. Wherever you go, you
would see that one thing is very common between all these sites.
The similarity is, all of them have a section called "HijackThis
Logs" for HijackThis Log Analysis.
He is also the creator of the
infamous CWShredder Application. This wonderful tool
removes the notorious CoolWebSearch
Spyware and its variants. Also to his credit are a
lot of other applications like StartupList, ADS Spy,
IBProcMan, BHOList, Kill2Me etc. A complete
list of all the applications created by Merijn can be
found in the url:
http://www.merijn.org/programs.php
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HijackThis was made on
the basis of an article by Mike Healan called "Hijacked!"
in the site
www.spywareinfo.com
Later CWShredder and HijackThis
was sold to Trend Micro. CWShredder is now
owned and maintained by InterMute/Trend Micro since October 19,
2004. The creation of HijackThis and CWShredder
and their popularity has immortalized the name of Merijn. The
official website of Merijn is in
www.merijn.org.
Below an interview with
Merijn: What is
your full name?
Merijn Bellekom
When & Where were you born?
Utrecht, 1980.
What is your current occupation?
I'm in the middle of my second university study. I
did Chemistry before this (1998-2003) and I have one year of Information
Science left.
Who/What has been your biggest influence?
I don't really have a target to aspire to.
What Programming Languages you know?
A lot, but I'm not 'fluent' in all of them. I know
VB, VB.NET and JS best. Other languages I touched on are PHP, C and C++.
What Language did you use to make HJT?
VB6.
What was the reason you developed HJT?
There were a lot of people coming on an antimalware
forum I frequented with similar problems, and we had a checklist with
stuff to remove and check to cure them. Based on Mike Healan's 'Hijacked!'
article on
www.spywareinfo.com
I wrote a basic app that facilitated checking about a dozen sections of
the system and display results. About a month ago I looked up the original
post, it was on Cexx.org:
http://web.archive.org/web/20020823061832/boards.cexx.org/spytech/messages/283.html?board=spytech
Why did you sell HJT to Trend Micro?
I had less and less time to continue developing HJT
and I didn't want to let it fade into oblivion. Trend Micro is keeping it
alive this way.
Will you develop any other application like HJT?
Probably, I run into the same little annoyances that
caused me to write most of my apps almost daily. Once I have more free
time on my hands (I hope after getting my MSc) I might get back into the
Anti-Malware scene.
What is your opinion about the current Anti-Malware applications?
It seems there is (still) no silver bullet to cure
everything, security suites are giant leviathans that cause more problems
than they solve. When I dip into AntiSpyware forums these days it seems a
lot of packages are used that are a mish-mash of smaller security apps,
scripts and utilities, that run autonomously on an infected system and
spit out a log file. Forum regulars then analyze the log file and dole out
advice. It's actually a lot like it was when I first started helping
people with Spyware infections. :)
What is your idea about the future of Malwares?
I got out just before RootKits got really popular,
and I expect them to become even more widespread. While they originally
were just proof-of-concept things that showed how to hide things from
users, they're now being used by DDoS bots, Spambots and even some
corporate DRM stuff (see Mark Russinovich's posts about the Sony RootKit).
It's way beyond my programming skills but it's really fascinating stuff.
In general, Malware went from basic annoyances to very advanced stealth
tools with monetary profit as its main goal. Still, less and less of the
bad guys seem to know what they're doing, with all the prefab exploit
kits, Phishing kits etc that are around. More often than not, kits like
that are backdoored and they don't even realize it.
Is Signature based detection a vague idea of Security?
It used to be, but I see more and more websites that
spit out copies of Trojans that vary with each download. Signature-based
detection is useless for that. It'll do for the 90% of Malware that
doesn't use that kind of randomization stuff, though. Prevx is going in
the right direction with their behavior-based detection, I like that a
lot.
What are your future plans?
Finish university, get a proper job, house, 2.4
kids, that kinda stuff. I don't really have it planned out beyond that
first one.
How would you like to be remembered?
Pretty much like I seem to be remembered right now,
for writing HijackThis. There's still emails coming in weekly from people
thanking me for writing it. That's really nice to hear.
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