Slashdot Mirror
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."
No dice.
For the curious, I think it was Chode-e. I cleaned it manually."
Don't assume you were at fault, just because you need to jump through hoops to prevent your computer from getting infected.
Yes, but an OS can't know if the program run by a user is a trojan or a clean program. It's the user responsability to care of it. I agree that there should be a clear gap between user space and system and that's a big hole in most Windows configurations anyway, but everybody still need to care when they run any program. Period.
I hate all sigs, mine included.
I could not disagree more. Any piece of consumer hardware comes with a certain degree of risk to life and limb if improperly used. Certainly, no one who burned him/herself with the kitchen coffee maker would indicate it 'was my own fault' because given a sufficient level of care in its manufacture (perhaps even a rating from Underwriters Labs or the equivalent) there's nothing short of gross user error that would result in such an occurance.
Software need be no different.
Pretending that vendors need to protect us from every random or malicious occurance involving their products is the same broken thinking that has resulted in the hideous state of tort law in the US, has driven production and insurance costs through the roof and makes us all look like morons when some idiot spills hot coffee in his lap or catches a virus and needs someone to blame, sue, leech off of, etc.