Trend Micro Announces HijackThis to Go Open Source

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In part from Trend Micro Releases HijackThis Source Code to sourceforge.net -- CUPERTINO, Calif., Feb. 17, 2012 /PRNewswire/ --

Program's Creator Merijn Bellekom Endorses Open Source Move

The code, originally written in Visual Basic, is now officially available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/hjt/.

"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.

Trend Micro has offered HijackThis as a free tool since acquiring the antispyware freeware tool from its Netherlands-based creator, Merijn Bellekom in 2007...

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Trend Micro will continue to maintain the original source code and will update the base code on SourceForge as developers make modifications that are essential and positive to the continued improvement of this code.  As new malicious code is released faster than ever before, the need for analyzing log data to identify new malicious code is more important than ever.  Through this offer to the open source community, the product has the opportunity to develop and become an even better solution to quickly identify new malicious code.

"HijackThis moving to open source is a really exciting stage for this tool and a big thanks to Trend Micro for bringing this tool back to life.  HijackThis was once the most used tool for enumerating Windows startup programs and quickly identifying the presence of malware.  Moving HijackThis to open source will prompt more rapid releases and also allow more people to be involved in the project so that it is able to keep pace with current infection techniques," said Larry Abrams, Owner and Founder of BleepingComputer.com.