whats the worst/harmless piece of malware?

What is the most destructive, annoying and just plain crap, piece of malware? and what is the most harmless peice of malware? Harmless as in doesn't destoy any data, collect personal info, ect.

 

Pains ITA: IST, CWSearch, (and variants), Nimda, MyDoom, Code Red descendents...many others.

Can't speak about "harmless" ones.

 

I don't think you can call harmless stuff malware, but i know what you mean, annoying etc. I would include Popups/Cookies/Web bugs/Adware and things like that in the list.

I've made sure i don't suffer any of them, apart from the rare temp only cookie !


StevieO

 

Isn't the EICAR anti-virus test file considered harmless?

-- Tom

 

Coolwebsearch or was already said? APITA regardless.

 

Whenever I use UnknownDeviceIdentifier.exe. It leaves a shortcut to the website on the desktop. Thats the most benign.

 

I agree with Coolwebsearch as being one of the most harmful, at least the variants seen in the last two years or so. I've seen a Windows 2000 machine infested with one of their variants at work and while we were able to clean it, it never really fully recovered (I'm guessing there was still a lot of junk in the registry and some system files were corrupted): it always operated quite a lot slower and Internet Explorer had trouble working properly.

 

I have to agree that CWS is without a doubt the one nasty that has an organization behind all of its growing variants, and they seem to be getting nastier all of the time.

They modify their name, location in the registry and file system in order to survive.

CoolWebSearch aka CWS gets my vote as the nastiest bugger out there.

-- Tom