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Students Learn To Write Viruses
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."
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?
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.
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.
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