HijackThis is a free security tool written by Dutch student Merijn Bellekom. Trend Micro planned to announce their acquisition of HijackThis.

According to Trend Micro chief technical officer Ed English, Trend Micro has no plans to meddle with this existing community-based support. HijackThis will continue to be a free download, and security sites won't have to change what they do at all. The only noticeable difference will be a new "Analyze This" button, which will send the log directly to Trend Micro and get back a quick summary of any problems found, along with a list of sites that offer expert removal help. This version also fixes all outstanding bugs including problems that kept it from working properly with IE7 and Vista.

The benefit to Trend Micro is, of course, that they can add the non-personal information from the logs to their overall database and use it to improve their own security products. Per English, "Free tools are both feel-good and a good thing to do," increasing Trend Micro's visibility and helping users, to boot.

The experts who analyze HijackThis logs for people don't get paid. It's a community-spirited effort. And HijackThis remains free. Whether these experts will feel any different about donating their time now that HijackThis belongs to Trend Micro remains to be seen.

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