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