Security Management Strategies for the CIOA talking Trojan is a Trojan horse that mocks the user of an infected PC with a repeating audio message while it deletes the entire contents of a hard drive. Security vendor Panda Software SA detected the first talking Trojan, BotVoice.A, in the summer of 2007.
PandaSoft warns that infection can occur through multiple vectors, including:
- through physical storage devices like USB flash drives, smartphones, iPods or CD-ROMs
- directly through a download initiated by other malware or from malicious Web pages
- over P2P networks.
Once the talking Trojan has been installed, the application uses the Windows text reader to play the following text:
"You have been infected. I repeat you have been infected and your system files has [sic] been deleted. Sorry. Have a nice day and bye bye."
The Trojan prevents certain file types from running. Disabled file extensions include BAT, COM, EXE and MP3. BotVoice.A also disables the Windows registry editor and the Task Manager which can make it difficult for the average user to stop active processes and undo deletions.