Malware That Helps Improve Infected Devices’ Security?

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Malware that improves infected devices’ security? Now that's a switch.

Wifatch’s code does not ship any payloads used for malicious activities, such as carrying out DDoS attacks, in fact all the hardcoded routines seem to have been implemented in order to harden compromised devices. We’ve been monitoring Wifatch’s peer-to-peer network for a number of months and have yet to observe any malicious actions being carried out through it. Wifatch not only tries to prevent further access by killing the legitimate Telnet daemon, it also leaves a message in its place telling device owners to change passwords and update the firmware.
 
I wonder if this is a ploy by a computer service company? Freak the customer out with strange techno-babble warnings (so they'll come in), but prevent the computer from being seriously infected (keep the fixing work easy).
 
That is is not a new thing. I call it Norton.

Zing!
 
NeghVar said:
Reminds me of Welchia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welchia
Click to expand...

Yup, that is what came to mind when I saw the headline. Didn't remember what it was called, just remember a virus that spread trying to stop the spread of blaster and one other virus.

Sadly I think I saw it break tcp/ip more often than actually patch windows, but still a computer can't spread a virus if it can't access the network and it was simple enough to fix.

There isn't a lot of malware / viruses like this out there, but there are some every once in a great while.
 
If the opposite of malicious is benevolent, then wouldn't that make this not malware but rather benware?
 
I like the concept of attacking or treating malware infections with not-quite-malware that serves a benign purpose. It reminds me a lot of bacteriophage therapy, in which viruses embedded within bacteria are used to treat pathogenic bacterial infections.
 
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