A Searchable Virus Database?

PktLoss asks: "I recently got hit with a worm/trojan, it was my own fault, I got sloppy. Anyways, once I got hit with the virus it was time to get rid of it. It had infected my system while my A/V program was running, so I presumed it was rather new. I already knew a bunch about it: it was a Messenger Worm; it killed regedit, msconfig or taskmanager upon being run; and it turned off viewing hidden/system files, in Explorer. This information in hand, I thought I would have an easy time figuring out what it was, and hopefully locating a dedicated cleaner, I was wrong. In my mind I envision a page with an advanced search allowing you to give it the information you have (attack vector/type, symptoms, etc) one at a time, each new piece of information cutting down the list of possibilities. Does such a page exist? If not why not?" "Instead of an easy search, I started off Googling in the dark, dropping key words in the hope they would point me in the right direction. When that failed I moved to the websites of major anti-virus vendors, either continuing to search based on key words I felt were relevant, or just listing viruses in reverse chronological order and reading their summaries.

No dice.

For the curious, I think it was Chode-e. I cleaned it manually."

Comments

Simple enough...

[Otter]

Does such a page exist? If not why not?

Because that's the single most precious asset the anti-virus makers have!!! There's no way they're going to give that away! And it doesn't seem like a huge priority for a volunteer effort as the sort of people capable of and interested in doing that work don't often get viruses.

Taught thinking

[A beautiful mind]

MS and the companies profiting from malware (Anti-virus companies, etc) taught people into the "I recently got hit with a worm/trojan, it was my own fault, I got sloppy." mindset. But in reality, this shouldn't be and isn't like that.

True, a user needs education to use a computer intelligently, but it is largely up to the given software platform's coders to fix issues like that.

Don't assume you were at fault, just because you need to jump through hoops to prevent your computer from getting infected.