Trend Micro Announces HijackThis to Go Open Source

Trend Micro HijackThis has been a free utility that generates an in-depth report of registry and file settings from your computer. HijackThis makes no separation between safe and unsafe settings in its scan results – this offers you the ability to selectively remove items from your machine. In addition to this scan-and-remove capability, HijackThis comes with several tools that are useful for manually removing malware from a computer.

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. Trend Micro will still maintain a copy of the original source code and update the code at times to ensure developers can always get access to the Trend Micro version.

Advanced users can use HijackThis to remove unwanted settings or files.

You can download the latest HijackThis from Majorgeeks at http://majorgeeks.com/Trend_Micro_HijackThis_d5554.html

Trend has not yet posted the source code but we will make it available as soon as they release it.

Source: http://www.majorgeeks.com/story.php?id=33365

 

Typically open source can be good. In this case they have not updated it in a year and really did little with it since they bought it. A trusted person or comapny can do a lot with it. Also worth considering is that HijackThis is actually now a very niche tool that is usually needed just for some cleanup. In other words its usefulness has basically expired so I see this as a potentially positive thing.