The question has come up and the answer is “no.” No, VIPRE and other Sunbelt software have not been infected by Virus.Win32.Induc.a.
For a virus with no malicious payload in 2009, Virus.Win32.Induc.a has certainly made the headlines. It’s probably the fact that it is an innovative idea. Maybe an update will make it malicious, but it does nothing now.
According to Sunbelt Vice President of Threat Research and Technologies Michael St. Neitzel, Delphi is used by developers much more in Europe and Russia than in the U.S.
According to St. Neitzel: “This is a real challenge for anti-virus vendors and those on the receiving end. When AV scanners start identifying applications as infected with Win32.Induc, it’s an open question whether or not the scanners can clean them.”
“If they can’t, the original developers are going to be required to get the infection out of their Delphi compilers, recompile the applications and get the clean code back to their customers. Given there could be different versions of the infected applications in circulation, this is going to be a real nightmare for some companies to deal with,” he said.
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Tom Kelchner