63 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
63 lines
3.4 KiB
Plaintext
Virus Writers Reply
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Personally we [Australian Parasite and me] think the Aussie virus scene
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is in an OK kind of state at the moment. There are not many of us here
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that write viruses, and some are just lammers rehashing other people's
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work. We never really could understand the paranoia that surrounds them.
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It's just a little piece of code, but to see the faces of people when they
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say "Oh my God, I've got a virus, I'll have to reformat my 600Gb hard
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disk" is great.
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It's unbeleivable how badly people react. It separates the men/women
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from the boys/girls. The easiest way to remove a virus is to get one of
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the virus writers to write you an antidote. It's very simple and
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painless. All it takes is a copy of the virus to analyse.
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We'd also like to blow away the myth of "pirates get what they
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deserve". Viruses are less likely to travel on pirated games than the
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shareware stuff from bulletin board systems. Why ? Because most of the
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sysops who run underground boards aren't morons. How often do you hear
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about people getting hit by pirated games compared to trojan shareware
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utilities ? The exception to this was when Nuke worked their way through
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INC and THG. Look at the amount of trojans around now. They are mostly
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shareware stuff: few, if any, are games.
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Of course the Anti-Virus folk benefit. We don't get any money from
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doing this but they do. They live off us. And don't say that if there
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were no viruses there would be no anti-virus programmers. If the anti's
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stopped updating scanners then we (the Australian Institute if Hackers)
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would consider this victory and cease to write them. This one of the
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reasons why we create viruses. To create, mutate, live, travel and
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experience. Stephen W. Hawkins defends our actions: in his eyes we create
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artificial life forms. And that comes from a highly regarded scientist.
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Pam Keanes' comments that viruses could not be the work of kids
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bewilders me. I learnt assembler when I was 15. Writing a virus is a
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very easy thing to do. A simple memory resident, non-overwriting COM
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infector would take 10 mintues to write from scratch. Stealth is also
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a pretty easy thing to develop. It's like writing a cheat mode - you only
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have to trap and monitor.
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Dark Avenger's MTE is good, but no virus writer worth their salt
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willingly uses other peoples code: only lammers do this. Studying it
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and modifying it severely is another matter altogether, and is not seen
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as an act of 'lammerism'.
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In our expert opinion we think Scan 2.0 is the best detection
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program -- here's ou quick rundown.
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Scan 2.0: Quick, scans more than any other and cleans pretty good too.
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Easier to trojanise than the old style Scan.
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Vbuster: Not too bad. A nice range of utilities most people will never
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use. Detects quite a few, and cleans a couple.
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VET: Too few options, and kludgy to use. Does not scan many at all.
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Norton: Nice menu system, but too expensive and does not detect as many
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as Scan 2.
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MS Anti-Virus: Wouldn't trust this as far as we could throw it. CPAV
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was bad, but this cut-down version is dire. Finds few, cleans even less
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and too much hassle to update.
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Thunderbyte: We hate it!
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'DARK FIBER'
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Australian Institute of Hackers
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