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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."
im a bit of a zealot myself - but in fairness to other OS', not particularly MS--if one was used as much as Windows is, I could be sure there would be many more viruses than currently exist, for say, Linux, currently.
Not the extent that exist for Windows, however.
We're like rats, in some experiment! -- George Costanza
I won't say where or whom, but there are some virus writers that work for major software corporations - not for writing AV software, but rather to put out viruses to punish software pirates. If Joe Blow stops worrying about viruses, after all, there's going to be a lot more 'liberated' software floating around.
Here's the kiddies website: http://www.geocities.com/spth666/main.htm
mix_master_mike
vafrous
Windows (or any operating system) needs more than an extension to execute a file. In order for a program to self execute it needs it needs to be compiled for your operating environment. If you rename Something.exe to Something.jpg Windows will first look at the extension then send your jpg file to the associated viewer to be interpreted as jpg data (which it is not, and thus cause the jpg viewer to produce an error (if it is well written), or crash (if it is not). Now if you take a jpg file and rename it to an exe and double click on it. Windows will assume that the program is executable, and it will load the boot header (collection of bytes at the start of any executable that is produced when the program is compiled) and grant all requests that the boot header asks for (things like memory, address space, etc). If this process fails in any way (like, say, the boot header is complete garbage because it's really jpg data) then the operating system (if it is good) will produce an error, or (if it is bad) crash. So JPG's cannot double as executables nor the other way around. BUT...
It is possible that embedded in the meta data of the JPG file (usually used for embedding the date the file was created and the camera used to take it) is some compiled machine code (it would have to be small and simple otherwise the size of the JPG file would disproportionate to the actual image) and IF the JPG viewer that some unlucky user had, contained some buffer overflow error, then it might be possible to load a simple program into RAM, then by virtue of the buffer overflow get it to execute and thus enabling a larger more complex program to run.
However this error would only exist in that specific version of that specific software, so it's ability to spread would be limited. The danger is if the program that interprets that JPG file is system wide or part of Windows standard suite of applications. Then your audience is huge. This is what makes Windows such a dangerous platform for script viruses. Because they have chosen to make their IE engine the central rendering engine of all of their applications (and they have made it easy and powerful enough to entice just about every other application developer to use it as well). Further more they have given their IE engine so many abilities, like the ability to arbitrarily execute machine code (this is how by visiting Apple.com you can install QuickTime, because the web site can download a program on your computer and execute itself, true you need to approve it, but once you say yes every subsequent visit is automatic, they REALLY need to add a "Never trust This source" checkbox) This means if there is a single flaw in the IE engine then that flaw is exploitable across every windows workstation and every application that uses IE as a rendering engine. Now why Mozilla doesn't make an ActiveX Gekko engine with the same function names as the IE ActiveX module so users have a choice which rendering engine they want, is a mystery to me yeah it would be hard, but it's not like Microsoft could pull the rug out from under them, Microsoft is very invested in their API, any change they made to it would break all the 3rd party apps.
-Jason