HijackThis! sold to Trend Micro

[nihil]

I just saw this:

http://www.trendsecure.com/portal/en...hijackthis.php

Trend Micro have bought HijackThis! It is still free at the moment and Trend haven't started supporting it.

[TejasV]

Hi,
May be they will charge for support.

[4cr0nDk]

There are alot of doubts (maybe paranoia) 'bout this sell in the support forums that have used hijackthis for a long time now....

Hijackthis have a lots of users using it and could be quite a damage for the rookie one. I doubt that trend create a departament that offer the amount of support that tool have in the forums, is to much work, personal training, to have a centralized site to do that, dumb when you already have a lots of sites that do that job.

I think that they're looking for publicity and maybe some money but nothing more. At the moment, representative people from trend are listening proposals in some forums like geekstogo and swi but who knows where all this end....



Regards

[nihil]

Yes, I seem to recall reading it had been downloaded 10,000,000 times.

Looking on the positive side, they are still providing CWShredder free?

Being the sort of guy that I am, I visited their site and looked at the licence agreement . Down in the small print it says for "personal use" so maybe they intend to bundle it with their corporate security suite and charge for supporting that?

I can also believe their suggestion that it is for them to gather data on malware trends. Corporates tend to keep attacks and infections quiet, whereas private users generally just want it fixed.

[brokencrow]

HJT's been getting "stale". It's been a couple of years since HJT got updated, hasn't it?

IceSword's a better app.

[nihil]

Yes, that's what Merijn was saying on his site. He hadn't updated in just over a year as he didn't have time due to his university work.

The new one on the Trend Micro site is 2.0 beta I believe, so that is new.

[4cr0nDk]

AFAIK cwshredder is still free and its also integrated in their products as realtime antihijacker protection.

Wouldn't be weird that hijackthis will be offer in some sort of integrated app to any of their suites like cwshredder and also could be downloaded for free as single app.

One good point of this matter is the update offer by trend, and keep that maintence that Merijn didn't anymore. I remember that everybody (in support forums) was waitting for the 1.99.2 version release, but it never came, now with trend taking that job in their hands, improvements are expected without dreaming them.




Regards

[dalek]

I think Trend will be good for HJT, and I think they will still offer it for free, but may have an automatic analyzer and not a forum, I suspect the main HJT forums will still offer their services to help/assist those who wander aimlessly...

Besides Trend relies mostly on corporate customers and is able to provide the things like the "housecall" and assistance because of this, they don't cater by selling to the everyday user like Norton or McAfee does, well not on their scale anyway's.

[nihil]

As I understand it, 1.99.2 (as far as Merijn got with it) was completed and some extra stuff added. This is all in the Trend 2.0 version.

In addition Trend say that they will be adding more features.

Personally, I have been a Trend customer for a long time and have been happy with them.............I used McAfee before then.............when the updates were posted to you on floppy disks

I don't promote commercial products, particularly on this site, but I will express satisfaction or the opposite if that has been my experience.

For those remotely interested, I also use ClamWin, AVG, Avast, VirusSafe, and AntiVir...........

[4cr0nDk]

The automatic analizer is something criticized by many forums (even where trend is taking notes and proposals) they say that it can be as good as having a person moving the string.....anyway, wouldn't be bad if trend uses this method to increase their data base of malwares, hijackers, spywares and so on...


As far as I know, hjt 1.99.2 was ready but never actually released or used, obviously I could be wrong, but the forums I know and where I work a little, did use the 1.99.1 version

Still there are many words and little work done to see benefits or not.



Regards