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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."
Please bear with me...this takes a minute to explain.
When I was in growing up, I had some cousins who lived just a couple miles or so from me, out in the country. It was a large family, four boys and two girls, and they had a small farm with cows.
There was also a small farm next door to them, which was bought and sold many times over the years.
By the time I was in high school, a family moved in next door to my cousins who were known only as "The Moles". This was because they looked about as close to a mole as any human you had ever seen. Tiny, squinty eyes and buck teeth were the norm for the family, whom I never really met, but some of the young Moles attended the same high school as I did.
I had a rowdy acquaintance named Deon who was all too familiar with the Moles. He was a friend of my cousins' also, which was how he originally came to be acquainted with the Moles. He particularly enjoyed torturing one member of the Mole family named Charlie. Charlie Mole helped out in the school cafeteria around lunch time. A half hour or so before lunchtime, Charlie had the task of wheeling a big cart full of cinnamon rolls from one part of the cafeteria to another. Unfortunately for Charlie, this was usually the time that Deon was taking a break in the cafeteria. And so, nearly every day, Deon would bomb poor Charlie Mole with empty milk cartons, or whatever other debris happened to be nearby, during the trip. This would upset Charlie greatly, who would yell at Deon and tell one of the cafeteria ladies about the attack, but Deon was always long gone by the time the cafeteria lady would come out to confront him. Eventually, Deon began stealing cinnamon rolls in a hit-and-run style attack as Charlie wheeled the cart by.
One afternoon during the following summer, Deon and I were returning from a trip to my cousins' house in my dad's old '72 Chevy pickup. We were probably stoned and also drinking beer, but certainly not looking for trouble of any kind.
Now, on the road between my cousins' house and mine, there was a huge valley with a creek than ran through the bottom. A bridge crossed the creek at the bottom of the rather steep valley. Many people liked to fish and hike around this crossing, so there were often people walking along the road near the bridge.
So, as Deon and I turned the last corner before the road dropped down toward the creek, a couple of figures could be made out walking right down the center of the road, on the yellow line, on the other side of the bridge. They were accompanied by a large white Husky dog. Before I could comment on what a couple of idiots they must be for walking down the middle of the road, Deon recognized them. "MOLES!" he screamed. With no further words, we each rolled down our window to scream at the Moles as we went by, and I floored it, which would get their attention.
The Moles looked behind them to see the big blue Chevy pickup flying down the middle of the street, coming right at them. Stupidly, they split up, with one Mole going over to the left side of the road, the other Mole to the right. As we rolled by, we each screamed nasty threats to our respective Moles. After screaming at the Mole on my side of the street, I looked up to see the large white dog. It was standing in the street sideways, perfectly still, paying no attention to us, its head lined up with the left-front corner of the pickup. It was already too late. The front bumper of the truck, which was moving at something like 60 MPH, caught the dog's head dead-on, probably damn near decapitating it. Realizing we'd just accidentally killed their dog in a hit-and-run only made us laugh harder, and I floored it outta there.
The following September, school started again. I had a friend named Dickie, a quiet, nice fellow who used to smoke dope and occasionally take other interesting drugs with some of my friends and I. One day very early in the new school year, I was in the high school's smoking area, recounting this whole Mole tale with a few friends who also knew and