March 21, 2001

5:47 PM

VBS Worm Generator Software.I read in a foreign techi. publication about this Argentin kid who supposedly offers this virus generating software on his homepage. Being a layperson I don't know what to make of it. Is this possible?
posted by semmi (5 comments total)

Fuck jail and give him the death penalty for those annoying popup windows. I hate people that do that.
posted by Zool at 5:55 PM on March 21, 2001

Of course it's possible. There have been virus generators out there for ages, and this isn't even the first VBS one I've seen. The bar to writing a virus or worm is very low these days.

By the way, I wouldn't recommend visiting that link unless you like closing popup windows.
posted by ffmike at 5:56 PM on March 21, 2001

Virus generators have been around for ages, but even before that, most viruses were simply modifications of pre-existing ones. There are only a handful of ways that programs like this can spread, and the basic techniques are already well known. Indeed, a VBS worm is devastatingly simple to write by comparison with your old-fashioned disk boot-sector virus: back then you had to known assembler code! Plus, you had to wait for the end-user to sneakernet your virus to a new victim. Mail worms just piggyback on the already-open network connections and mail systems.

The flip side of this is that the more in common a virus has with its predecessors, the easier it is to detect and defeat. So generally something like this simply preys on people who haven't patched their systems or updated their virus signatures. The only viruses that really spread and cause problems are the ones where someone first finds and exploits a loophole.
posted by dhartung at 6:42 PM on March 21, 2001

Since the days of my Amiga, i have not seen any really damaging viruses written. Sure their annoying ( like popup windows ) but don't cause any damage. I remember some nasty viruses going around that could stuff up your Amiga pretty badly.
posted by Zool at 7:32 PM on March 21, 2001

The difference, Zool, is that viruses today rarely go around trying to erase your hard drive. The end-user experiences annoyance.

Administrators, alas, such as myself -- we have to take down mail servers, restore from backups, patch, etc. and it's usually overnight. So don't say there's no damage -- your IT personnel are bearing the brunt of these mail worms.
posted by dhartung at 3:40 PM on March 22, 2001