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Simple Virus For Teaching?

Posted by samzenpus on from the my-first-malware dept.

ed1023 writes "Currently I am teaching a 101 class on computers. It is more of a 'demystifying the black box' type of class. The current topic is computer viruses; I am looking for a virus with which I can infect the lab computers (only connected to local network, no outside network connection) that would be easy for the students to remove by hand. Can the Slashdot community point me in any directions? Is there an executable out there that would work, or do I try to write one myself, or is there one that is written that I can compile myself?"

3 of 366 comments (clear)

  1. EICAR by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EICAR_test_file

  2. Write your own? by rwa2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's Windows, so it's easy... just create a CD or USB drive with two files:

    autorun.inf :
    [autorun]
                open=installpopup.bat

    installpopup.bat :
    cmd.exe /k echo "Hi I am a virus"
    copy installpopup.bat "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup"

    Bonus is that it has plenty of legitimate uses for system automation for your little script kiddies as well.

  3. Re:What OS? And how annoying? by crisco · · Score: 5, Informative
    Back in the late 80s we had a bunch of 10MHz XT clones in a computer lab networked together using Novel and 10BASE2 or maybe even TokenRing. Some of the games we had ran timing loops for the original 4.77 MHz PC so we had some simple TSR that sat on the interrupt timer and ran some NOPs to slow the computers down. I thought it would be a funny prank to add this to the AUTOEXEC.BAT file on most of the boot floppies in the lab, sadly I didn't test it on more than one computer.

    The interrupts and NOPs interfered greatly with the network cards, causing the whole thing to come crashing down when more than a couple of the computers were running at a time. It took at least a couple of days for the sysadmin to sort it out.

    RIP George, thanks for introducing me to the Internet and I'm sorry that you didn't get to stick around for Linux and /. I should have taken your Minix class when I had the chance.

    --

    Bleh!