New Tools to Battle the Sinowal Trojan

For years, the Sinowal Trojan has stymied efforts by antivirus vendors and security experts to hunt it down. In the meantime, it has gone about its business of stealing credentials from about 500,000 bank accounts, according to security experts.

Antivirus vendor Authentium thinks it might have built a better mousetrap that will protect users against the Trojan, also known as Torpig and Mebroot. The technique uses reverse sandboxing, chief technology officer Ray Dickenson told InternetNews.com.

Think of reverse sandboxing as doing the much same thing a white corpuscle does when the human body is invaded by a virus. It surrounds a virus and does not let it get out to attack the rest of the system. Unlike the white corpuscle, however, the reverse sandbox does not launch its own attack on the virus.