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Students Learn To Write Viruses

Posted by samzenpus on from the mischief-101 dept.

snocrossgjd writes "In a windowless underground computer lab in California, young men are busy cooking up viruses, spam and other plagues of the computer age. Grant Joy runs a program that surreptitiously records every keystroke on his machine, including user names, passwords, and credit-card numbers. Thomas Fynan floods a bulletin board with huge messages from fake users. Yet Joy and Fynan aren't hackers — they're students in a computer-security class at Sonoma State University. Their professor, George Ledin, has showed them how to penetrate even the best antivirus software."

6 of 276 comments (clear)

  1. Penetrate even the best antivirus software? by ohcrapitssteve · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why bother trying to "penetrate antivirus software?" Just tell the user to kindly disable it else they'll be denied their dopey smiley emoticon pack or the privilege of having the Taco Bell dog read them their email or some shit.

    Why bother working to evade potentially sophisticated technological security when you can go after the very very weakest link... the user?

  2. Old News by dcollins · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Virus writing was part of my assembly & architecture class circa 1990.

    --
    We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
    1. Re:Old News by devonbowen · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Back when the Morris worm hit in '88, I was teaching assembly language. We'd spent the whole day on the worm (making sure it hadn't planted or destroyed any files on our machines) and I didn't have a lecture prepared by class time. So I told them I'd explain the worm instead but that they could leave if they wanted since it wouldn't be on the exam. Our topic the week before was how the stack was changed during function calls so they already had the background. No one left and I got the pleasure of watching faces light up around the room as it dawned on people where my explanation was going. Ah, those were the days...

      Devon

  3. Re:"We've Changed this Game" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I used to write viruses. Evading anti-virus software was sort of like the testing//tweaking phase of software development -- "oops, mcafee flagged it as suspicious, let me modify this line of code here, this one here... ahah, fixed".

    The truth is, anti-virus technology hasn't significantly changed since the DOS days. It's all about heuristics, pattern-matching, and behavior-preventing. It's trivial to evade these technologies.

  4. Re:Hostile Authorities by Darkness404 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yes, but why are they even caring? I mean, today I picked up a copy of 2600 from a local bookstore, in there I learned how to Arp poisoning, obtain malware via a honeypot, and all kinds of info that is similar to this. Yet I don't see the FBI raiding 2600's publisher burning all copies of the magazine.

    You can get cracking techniques from loads of places, this guy's teachings is old news.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
  5. What about martial arts.. by Safiire+Arrowny · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If a person learned Jujitsu, he would effectively be learning ways to kill people among other things. This doesn't equate to actually killing people, or actually beating people up, etc. Maybe you use your martial art to save your girlfriend or do other some good thing someday.

    Just because you can possibly use some skill to be evil doesn't mean you shouldn't learn it.

    It's like a saying police shouldn't know any martial arts or learn to shoot a gun because they could use the skills to kill someone.