What is a Virus?
Simply put, a Virus is a piece of software which makes copies of itself and spreads itself across the internet. In some circles of the Information Security field, people insist that a virus also requires some level of user action in order to propagate, such as opening an e-mail or running a program.
This ability of a virus to copy it’s self is called self-replication.
Black hat crackers create the majority of viruses in circulation.
There white hat reasons for creating viruses as well. Some researchers create viruses in order to find new ways to block and defeat them. Others create viruses for the pure pursuit of knowledge. Responsible Virus researchers create their viruses on a darknet.
Some hackers create viruses designed to delete other viruses. Unfortunately these hackers usually don’t have the resources to test what their viruses will do to other users systems, and they can cause problems just as bad as, if not worse than, the viruses they were trying to defeat.
April 27th, 2007 at 2:13 am
The original viruses were the first instances of DRM or Digital Rights Management as software code and software was often copied. Programmers knew the exact hardware they were righting for so they made checks in the code so that if it was on anything but that hardware or that particular system it errored out in some way. Sometimes this even went as far as damaging other software on the machine or the machine itself.
April 27th, 2007 at 8:11 am
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April 27th, 2007 at 11:06 am
Do you have any sources on that? Because if that was how viruses got started, it would shed even more negative light on DRM.
April 27th, 2007 at 12:05 pm
It’s from one of my programming textbooks. Unfortunately I don’t have the book anymore.
In case your wondering this worked because early systems were specific computers and hardware plus specific software designed to work on just that system. Making it easier to the the checks I mentioned earlier. Now I mentioned that if the software was copied it would and could damage the software and or hardware of the new system since it wasn’t writen for that system. Though these aren’t strictly viruses as they do not self replicate beyond the system it’s on. Yet viruses are easily the next evolutionary step to this earlier code.
Now if you think this kind of thing stopped when standard architecture and Personal Computers became popular think again. While in most cases the damaging software is no long there the detection and sometimes reporting of what it finds is still there. Don’t think you don’t have it since likely you are using windows xp or windows vista, Both have this styled software and vista even has a security feature that allows Microsoft to turn off what it considers harmful drivers(read as possibly any that don’t pay them). WoW detects software and hardware data sending that back to Blizzard. As does many other pieces of software. In the end even I don’t do it often enough myself but read the user agreement it’s all there.
April 27th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Software that is designed for one system but run on another can damage that system without necessarily having that code written into them specifically. This was especially true in the earlier days of computing before we had standard architectures.
Porting software from one computer platform to another can be hazardous without any malicious attacks from software writers, in many cases it could just be that the software wasn’t designed to run with a particular non-standard OS, which was in turn developed for a particular non-standard hard-ware setup. And because of that when it tried to operate normally, it would interact poorly with the OS and hardware, not work right, and cause other stuff to blow up.
I’m sure there was malicious DMR like that, and still is. In fact there are some companies that insert hidden, identifying files on a computer and use that particular file to mark which computer is which when people install their software on these computers, and the installer interacts with a server, to find out if a given key has been used on another computer before.
Those files of course take up space on a user’s computer, and the reporting to a server definitely qualifies as spyware. Even worse, most companies that do this don’t ask for any kind of consent to do so. Some even call it a “service”.
April 27th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Sony did this when it put a rootkit installer on it’s music cd’s as part of a DRM effort. This brought consumer anger so the practice was stopped. Though the simple fact that this was done has brought alarm in many professional circles from computer security experts to administrators.
April 27th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
And that DMR software actually did damage to many people’s computers, which is how it was discovered, and it definitely qualifies as Malware.
April 27th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
It’s also proof that the ideas used by those early coders I described are still used today.
April 27th, 2007 at 2:05 pm
Agreed.
April 27th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
For those not in the know about Sony’s Digital Rights Management Rootkit CD and the problems it caused, you can find more facts on CNet: http://news.com.com/FAQ+Sonys+rootkit+CDs/2100-1029_3-5946760.html