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It's probably a Trojan. Or maybe, a Netgear WLAN utility, and not a Trojan...

by Staff Writer | posted on 17 October 2008


You may, having installed a Netgear WG111v2 wireless adaptor, start getting excited reports from your anti-virus software. It will tell you that "winservice.exe is a Trojan" and offer to isolate it.

An engineer recently let us know that it may be a Trojan, but equally, it may be legitimate. The simple test is: did you install that Netgear?

He posted a message on the CIX bulletin board, saying: 

"Don't know if it matters to anyone here, but many reputable sites (e.g. bleeping computer ) identify \system32\winservice.exe as a trojan, and no doubt it often is.

"Inspection of the file properties isn't encouraging (no manufacturer or product name, language is Chinese) and it provides the service SCM_Service (whose details again look suspicious). Deleting it and SCM_Service seem to stop nothing working.

"In fact, the Netgear WG111v2 wireless adapter installs it, so it's not always a trojan. Netgear support tends not to know this and will often advise that you have a virus (no doubt they Google like the rest of is) but I have recently had confirmation from their engineering department that is installed by design (although usually not needed)."

 Hope that helps someone.


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