Trend Micro Announces HijackThis to Go Open Source (Update)

The download of the source was made available in Uniz form or individual files. We have zipped the download back up for easy download and use. You can download the source from Majorgeeks here.

The original HijackThis from Merijn was a great tool back in the day for finding and removing some difficult malware. Every geek had (or still has) this on their computer. The program was taken over by Trend Micro and has not been updated in over a year. A beta version was also released less than a week after that and we were not impressed. Now, Trend has announced that this will go open source. We think this is a good thing because of how little the program is used in combating current forms of malware which often require smaller, niche tools. Going open source could breathe new life and functionality into the program and we look forward to seeing what developers can do with it.

According to Trend:

"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 as well as the latest beta at http://www.majorgeeks.com/Trend_Micro_HijackThis_BETA_d6316.html

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