Slashdot Mirror
The World of Virus Writers
No_Weak_Heart writes "Looking for a little weekend reading? You might try the cover story from this week's NY Times Magazine. It's titled The Virus Underground, and it takes a look at the world of malware scripters, virus writers and worm designers."
Some one should write a virus that will allow us to read NY Times without a suscribtion.
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
"The Virus Underground" sounds like a bad nightclub.
Du-uh -- everyone knows worms live underground !
Like a lot of virus writers, this guy is a bored teenager ... 50 years ago he would have been out vandalising his school. In somewhere between 20 and 50 years he'll have access to nanotechnology.
Format C: ? Overwrite every file? How about rebuild your washing machine so it suddenly appreciates the taste of "cat" and has the capability of acting out it's amorous feelings for your central heating.
(Philet0ast3r is an online handle; he didn't want me to use his name.)
Really? I mean I could have sworn that Philet0ast3r was a real name. Are you sure he isn't the son of the l33t3st parents in Europe: C4ptainKaos and S3xyH3xy?
John.
I would also recommend the title by the same author, "The Troll Underground", which highlights the life of the Slashdot troll
my theory that the most dangerous people are people who are bored.
Yes, how else could the Slashdot effect be so devastating, if not for millions of bored nerds looking for something to click on?
Then it asks me what I'd like the virus to do. Shall the Trojan Horse format drive C:? Yes, I click. Shall the Trojan Horse overwrite every file? Yes. It asks me if I'd like to have the virus activate the next time the computer is restarted, and I say yes again.
Umm, once you answer yes to the first question, are the rest not redundant?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
This kid would make a great poster boy for birth control.
Best Buy can have you arrested
"''This is a revenge worm,'' he explained -- for ''not hiring me, and hiring some loser that is not even half the programmer I am.''"
Perhaps someone should tell him that personality counts.
G
Why is "Second Part to Hell" naked in the picture in the article?
A tall blond friend in a jacket festooned with anti-Nike logos put his arm around Philet0ast3r and beamed.
''This guy,'' he proclaimed, ''is the best at Visual Basic.''
That's the first time the New York Times made beer come out of my nose!
Looking for a little weekend reading?
Why waste my weekend, when I can get paid to read it now?
What does it mean to wake out of a dream
and be wearing someone else's shorts?
BNL, Born on a Pirate Ship (1998)
Until someone loses some real big money because of a virus or trojan.
Yeah, yeah, there are "estimated" costs of every virus that comes out. And they're not small potatoes.
But just wait until a virus comes out that silently infects machines, travels slowly enough to be barely noticed and only does one thing: randomly change values in an Excel spreadsheet. Or randomly delete one column from a randomly picked sheet.
It'll be Armageddon: dogs and cats living together, Detroit winning the World Series AND the Super Bowl, etc.
--
Mando
If you make the biological systems analogy, you will also have to acknowledge that a diverse operating system ecosystem is critical to the health and well being of things, especially as the Internet becomes more widely available. We need Linux, IRIX, Solaris, Windows, OS X and embedded OS's to maintain the health of things.
What we really need is for Linux, IRIX, Solaris, Windows, OS X, and embedded OS's to start fornicating with each other like crazy, "go forth and multiply", and let the best children survive, while leaving the weak to die. So, open up all your ports, send massive amounts of data between the systems, and fire your sysadmins.