Clipmarks | nitroshockwave's clips

The size of our World

Mon, 30 Oct 2006 18:41:57 GMT

clipped by: drewrew
clipper's remarks: Kida puts things into perspective

Test your anti-virus program

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 21:37:11 GMT

clipped by: nitroshockwave
clipper's remarks: Visit http://www.eicar.org/anti_virus_test_file.htm for the test files

Clip Source: www.eicar.org

The Anti-Virus or Anti-Malware test file

If you are active in the anti-virus research field, then you will regularly receive requests for virus samples. Some requests are easy to deal with: they come from fellow-researchers whom you know well, and whom you trust. Using strong encryption, you can send them what they have asked for by almost any medium (including across the Internet) without any real risk.

Other requests come from people you have never heard from before. There are relatively few laws (though some countries do have them) preventing the secure exchange of viruses between consenting individuals, though it is clearly irresponsible for you simply to make viruses available to anyone who asks. Your best response to a request from an unknown person is simply to decline politely.

Obviously, there is considerable intellectual justification for testing anti-virus software against real viruses. If you are an anti-virus vendor, then you do this (or should do it!) before every release of your product, in order to ensure that it really works. However, you do not (or should not!) perform your tests in a "real" environment. You use (or should use!) a secure, controlled and independent laboratory environment within which your virus collection is maintained.

Using real viruses for testing in the real world is rather like setting fire to the dustbin in your office to see whether the smoke detector is working. Such a test will give meaningful results, but with unappealing, unacceptable risks.

You are encouraged to make use of the EICAR test file. If you are aware of people who are looking for real viruses "for test purposes", bring the test file to their attention. If you are aware of people who are discussing the possibility of an industry-standard test file, tell them about www.eicar.org, and point them at this article.

Tags: computing, virus, antivirus

Linux users are pitifully virus-deprived

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 21:32:03 GMT

clipped by: nitroshockwave
clipper's remarks: The details on the underwhelming Windows virii performances can be found at: http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/01/25/1430222

Clip Source: os.newsforge.com

Running Windows viruses with Wine

It just isn't fair that Windows users get all the viruses. I mean really, shouldn't Linux users be in on the fun as well? Well... thanks to the folks running the Wine project, Linux users can "catch the virus bug" too -- sort of.

Linux just isn't user-friendly when it comes to viruses. You have to work to find and run them. It doesn't happen automatically as it does with Windows. The GNU/Linux folks really should improve this glaring discrepancy.

While I have friends that collect viruses, I didn't need to bother them. I found plenty by looking through my staggering collection of bogofilter sorted mail. I apt-getted a copy of ClamAV, and after siccing it at my spam-and-other-things-I-don't-want-to-read collection, I yanked out a half-dozen unique, only Windows-compatible, viruses. That "only Windows-compatible" part was about to change.

Conclusion

Out of the five Windows viruses I ran under Wine, not a single one was able to send email and propagate itself. When I went out of my way to be part of the Windows community by doing my part to propagate Windows viruses (lots of Windows users seem to think this is important, seeing as how they run random executables and use Microsoft Outlook and Internet Explorer) I discovered that it couldn't easily be done with GNU/Linux tools. Oh sure, I could manually forward these viruses to the folks in my address book, but where's the fun in that? Besides, these viruses usually lie in the From: line and use a handful of different Subject: lines. As a GNU/Linux user, I really don't want to miss out on these important functionalities.

I tip my hat to the creators of the SomeFool virus, for actually (albeit temporarily and minimally) affecting my Linux experience. However, if that's the most damage I can get by running viruses with Wine under a dummy account, then it's clear that the Wine developers have a long way to go before Wine is truly Windows compatible.

Tags: humor, computing, virus

What's That?

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 10:05:01 GMT

clipped by: nitroshockwave

Clip Source: www.deviantart.com

What's that? by *dolphy

Tags: animals, humor