Slashdot Mirror
Fujitsu To Develop Vigilante Computer Virus For Japan
wiedzmin writes "Japanese Defense Ministry has awarded Fujitsu a contract to develop a vigilante computer virus, which will track down and eliminate other viruses, or rather — their sources of origin. Are 'good' viruses a bad idea? Sophos seems to think so, saying, 'When you're trying to gather digital forensic evidence as to what has broken into your network, and what data it may have stolen, it's probably not wise to let loose a program that starts to trample over your hard drives, making changes.'"
Would be the answer. A polite virus doesn't migrate automagically- it *asks* before it migrates.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Any "good" virus will be caught, captured, studied, mutated, and turned into a "bad" virus very quickly.
Also, a virus by definition installs software on a machine without the owner's consent. So it's never a good idea.
Advice: on VPS providers
Are 'good' viruses a bad idea?
McAfee, Norton, AVG, etc have built businesses around good viruses.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
Skynet, Landru, M5, the Matrix, HAL
There's plenty of art for reality to follow.
... the white cells from the attacking entities.
And the ramifications could get interesting.
For example, will it be illegal to tamper with such a white cell virus that's on your system? To reverse engineer it? To release your own distributed anti-virus system that might view such a white cell virus as a threat, and hunt it down and destroy it across multiple networks?
Check your premises.
Considering this is Japan, I'm pretty sure they got the idea from Ghost in the Shell. The Major often times references performing a Back Hack, to determine the location of an attacker. Now if only I could teach Windows how to enter Autistic Mode...
Windows has detected an undetectable error.
Specifically, I.E. 6 users, because fuck them.
What happens when the Fujitsu virus meets itself and destroys its own source of origin?
even windows 7 has infection rate of 4 per 1,000 machines. Let's talk about using real OS instead of Bill Gate's stupid glorified program loader.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9216654/Windows_7_s_malware_infection_rate_climbs_XP_s_falls
An arms race against an opponent that know no boundaries is typically futile.
It would be extremely difficult to develop a virus that could effectively spread and eliminate other infections without stooping to the same low levels as the malicious developers, at which point the friendly virus isn't so friendly anymore.
Sophos is right that such a counter-attack launched on a managed network with security-aware personnel capable of removing the malicious infections and performing a proper investigation is only going to complicate matters.
I could see this having a lot of collateral damage, since hackers like to bounce their connections off of legitimate IPs to hide their own locations. The Chinese hackers, for example, use HTran to do this for them - it makes it look like the attacks are coming from University campuses or from IPs belonging to dissident groups.
to develop operating systems that are impervious to viruses, trojans, worms and rootkits & etc... probably could not be done to 100% certainty but it can be implemented so the bad software is the rare exception to the rule rather than wide spread chronic infections like you see with that software from Redmond...
that would more than likely put Microsoft in to a niche corner and out of the desktop operating system & office software suite business...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Face the facts. The malware problem today is the result of large, highly-profitable, highly-competitive criminal empires. These programs are written by hired developers working in a business infrastructure, not random script kiddies locked away in their parents' basements. The developers creating this malware are typically doing so on Windows systems, though much of the delivery infrastructure does run on other platforms. It has nothing to do with ideology, vendettas, social failures or platform choices. It's all about the money.
The Internet and the vast number of computers connected to it form a vast, dynamic, and complex system whose detailed behaviour is difficult to fully understand and impossible to confidently predict.
Just like the introduction of Cane Toads in Australia, ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia ), and so many other similar introductions of organisms to 'fix' some problem in a complex ecosystem, this will probably turn out badly. And it may be impossible to undo once the virus is released into the favourable ecosystem that is the Internet.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Every time I see this, I remember the obvious counterargument.
- If OSX had better than 8% market share, wouldn't there be hordes of virus programmers (russian mafia, bored script kiddies and pranksters, whatever) looking for holes in it to take over?
- If Linux had better than 1% market share, wouldn't there be hordes of programmers trying to break it? Actually, if you look at the server market where Linux has a larger market share, they DO try to crack it - and lo and behold, they tend to succeed relatively on the same pace as breaking into Windows server boxes.
The question isn't, is Windows insecure? Of course it is - due in no small part to being not-securely-configured by hordes of user-level operators at their houses. But if everyone magically switched to your OS of choice, are we really likely to find that the situation improved at all? Probably not. Even at their smaller market share, it turns out OSX has had its fair share, and Linux as well.
And then, of course, there's the old "Problem between keyboard and chair" issue. Users willing to click on ANYTHING are going to be your worst source of problems, especially in the home market. Again, would that change if all of them switched to OSX or Linux? Of course not, they're still going to click on anything and enter their password to install the Free Puppy Screensaver or whatever else it is.
Did you by chance watch the Chaos Computer Club talk about Stuxnet? I was thinking the whole time: "Well there's part of the reason right there, MS: You hire folks like this moron."
The vulns exploited are a direct evidence of lack of security in design. I mean, Guest accounts telling printer drivers to "print to file" ANY WHERE on the drive?! AS ROOT?!?
Don't give me that "Mac & Linux are just as bad" bullshit. I deal with the Linux sources, MS isn't even in the same league. I've seen the (leaked) source code that Microsoft devs write... IT'S SHIT. Their OS is full of insecure kludgey shit. Remember the Zune Leap Year BS? Just try to get away with committing some of that shit to the Linux Kernel team. Google Tried committing crap kernel code from Android, guess what? IT WAS REFUSED; Told to get cleaned up. I mean... fuck man.. GET REAL!
Yawwwwwnnnn.
Bugs are committed to Linux all the time. You just don't hear about it as much. It's not "big news" because (a) less people are trying to make a botnet out of a couple million Linux boxes and (b) it doesn't feed the "let's bash on MS" crowd on Slashdot.
I'm not a Microsoft fanboy, but I'm willing to recognize the hurdles they have to face: trying to not break backwards compatibility, dealing with the fact that most home users will be the "fuck security, I don't want to have to enter a password it's MY computer" types, and being targeted because of sheer numbers of marketshare. And I guarantee you, if Linux had even 30% of the desktop market, you'd see an absolute ton of malware being written for it and "0-day" exploits every day. Even if the bugs were only present in the main branch of the discordant, splintered Linux distro world, it'd happen.
You persist in using desktop numbers, not internet server farm numbers. Which don't get published so much; they're mostly considered proprietary information. But it is easily verifiable that Google, Facebook, eBay, Amazon (including AWS), and pretty much all the other big names use Linux for their server farms, not Windows.
Yes, I concede that for desktops, Linux has a tiny market share.
For the internet backbones, server farms, research farms, and so forth, Windows doesn't get used all that much. And that's where the real concentration of data is.
Also, you don't take into consideration the value of a compromise. The value of compromising J Random Luser's home PC is far, far less than that of compromising say a Facebook server with personal information or getting into some company's AWS virtual hosts.
Check your premises.
Except that they don't have the same rate of success, as evidenced by the fact that all the hosts on AWS and Google and so forth haven't been turned into bot farms and all the data exposed to the world.
Check your premises.
OS X has it's fair share? Really? They have, say, 10% of the computer market, and about 0.0001% of the actual, in-the-wild viruses. The main problem on OS X is trojans (to which ANY platform is vulnerable) and OS X has NEVER had a self-replicating virus the way Windows has. (Nimda, Code Red, Sasser, etc.)
So yeah, if everyone switched to OS X or Linux, we probably WOULD be better off. Maybe not perfect, but much, much better.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
the freebsd port tree was the first attempt at a 'voluntary' walled garden, eg they would monitor and fix the ports tree, and you wouldn't get virused in the expected lifespan of the hardware. debian improved on the concept. with repositories, and ubuntu took away root with sudo commands... i realize from the software side there is no mechanism against installing 3rd party software, or making your user root, but the people who they intended to run the stuff wouldn't actually know they weren't in a walled guarden, if they followed the advice of their elders.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html