Recently there has been a rash of spyware that is capable of infecting Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista with one payload. In most observed cases, these infections owe their lineage to the rogue malware engine Trojan.Zlob which is ancient, prolific and ruthless. As a spyware platform it has given birth to many of computing’s more endearing infections, including Spylocked, which we wrote about on July 30th, Smitfraud and Spydawn. On 2000 and XP, the symptoms of infection are fairly benign — a tray app, fake alerts and a false program — but Vista users will find that their explorer.exe process is stuck in an infinitely-looping sequence of crashing.

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