Developers who dig around SourceForge for hidden treasures will be able to find from now on the source codes for HijackThis, the popular free security tool. HijackThis gained its popularity for its efficiency in scanning users’ computers in order to find settings that might have been changed by spyware, malware or other programs. Then the security tool generates detailed reports allowing advan ced users to analyze and fix their infected computers. And best of all, HijackThis does it for free.
And the news becomes even better as Trend Micro just announced to make HijackThis open source. “At this time, Trend Micro has decided to move the source code for HijackThis to an open source location. Open source developers can now take the source code and make their own modifications and additions they feel are needed,” is the announcement that has been posted a couple of days ago on the official website. “This means that other people can build on a solid base to create or improve their own anti-malware tools,” said Merijn Bellekom, the original creator of HijackThis.
The security tool was originally written in Visual Basic and the Cupertino based Trend Micro will still keep a copy of the original source code. The teams behind Hijack’s development promise to update the code from time to time in order to allow developers to access the latest version. In just three days, the open source HijackThis has been downloaded over 14.400 times and the count continues.
In addition to clean up actions, HijackThis users can benefit from the support of a fairly large community offering advices. There are a few popular security forums where users can post log files and get feedback from more experienced users and find out exactly what steps are needed in order to fix an infected computer.
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