I don't know, but for some odd reason I have an interest in virii and worms. No, no, not because they caused mass-destruction and plague many-a-user, but because of how they spread and stuff.

Any one else have this same interest?

......I'm betting $5 that this is locked within the next 15 posts

Yeah, I like worms and such. I find the more complex ones nice. The ways they travel..etc..

They're interesting maybe.. but I don't like them.

I don't know much about how worms propagate though.. never really cared to learn.

Well, I'm not going to say the technical details of how they spread, this is just a discussion of why they are interesting.

They spread through the exploiting of Macros in Outlook Express mostly. You can not gain worms by looking at web mail, but e-mail (that u download and open directly) contains worms sometimes.

so not true. If an exploit in IE/Netscape/Mozilla is found, any email service(except text) will allow the virus to spread. Luckily, most worms require you to open the email, whether it be Outlook or webbased. Unfortunantly there have been some exploits of the Outlook preview pane, but those are rare and it is easy to turn that pane off anyway.

Then there's the Blaster worm, which is not e-mail related.

Kanzure: VBScripts? Those're just lame.
The worms that I find interesting are those which do not require the receiver to do anything (or very little, like have the wrong program open at the wrong time ). Such as nimda, blaster, etc. Though incredibly annoying, they're fairly sophisticated.

I don't even understand how worms like sobig or the like even get a lot of attention. I've never caught one of those type of worms. The only pop3 email I use can only be emailed through my php scripts.

You know, I had the same question about why email viruses spread so easily, but the anwser comes when you realize just how stupid most home computer users are. They'll open anything. Plus Sobig doesn't use giant To: fields and it has subjects like, "Re: Your Job Application" so people looking for jobs will open that up. But yea, I haven't seen any email worms in my box, unless I they got thrown out as spam so I didn't notice them.

I find worms pretty interesting, I really don't know anything about them but it must take some pretty elegant code to be able to enter a system without the user's knowledge (well the more complex worms anyway). Actually causing damage to another person's system is not something that I like the idea of, however... And the sort of viruses (viri?) that just 'trick' the user into clicking a link to download the virus are pretty lame as well.

Repeat after me: The plural of virus is viruses. The plural of virus is viruses. The plural of virus is viruses. See, that wasn't so hard, was it?

The plural of virus is virii. The plural of virus is virii. The plural of virus is virii.

indeed it seems viri(i) is Non-English/nonsense ;-)

Yea, but virii sounds way cooler. And yes, it does take a bit of effort to exploit a system. You gotta find the vulnerability, figure out what happens int he vulnerability, toy with until you find out everything about it, then try to figure out how to use which includes yet another set of things to do. Once again though, I wont go into details, cause this isn't the place for that kinda detail.

Vulnerability == MicroSoft

naw, lots of *unix vulnerabilities too, but most of them don't seem like they'd be standard packages, just web hosting software.

I especially liked the old dos viruses, since dos was so lame it ran in real mode, a virus could control anything. The nowadays virii are bacterias at best.

Like nobody noes.

Lambik: Holy schmoly, I can't believe someone went to the trouble of that huge website about a single word...and I thought I wasted my free time...

Those're kewl!
When we got our first x86 system, it had a virus called 'Pong'.

I'd be sitting there playing Hero's Quest by Sierra, and suddenly this colorful ball would appear and start bouncing around..

haha, that's crazy. The only virus I got in the DOS days was one that deleted my root folder(C:\). I had to undelete EVERYTHING and try and guess the names of everything.

BTW Bacteria are much worse than viruses, in real life that is. They release poison and junk.

Trojan Horse: Bacteria(except trojans don't self-replicate)
Virus: Virus
Worm: Virus/tapeworms

That's the basic Computer Life to Real Life relations.

Derezo: funny stuff. I remember that long ago my uncle once had a virus on his 286 machine. It caused that the comp sometimes hanged on boot-up(~30% of times), and sometimes, very rarely, a psycho laugh would come out of the speaker.

There are funny things you can do on windoze as well, like this code:

BOOL CALLBACK My_enum_proc(HWND hwnd, LPARAM lParam)
{
SetWindowText(hwnd,"Look behind you!"));
EnumChildWindows(hwnd,My_enum_proc,0);
return true;
}
while(1)EnumWindows(My_enum_proc,0);

not tested and i dunno if it works on nt.

Set all the titles of the windows to "Look behind you!"?

Back in the DOS days it was also easier to get a virus, since most spread via disks, so they would infect game manufactors' machines. Then you would buy a game, put the infected disk in your computer, and BOOM.

That doesn't happen much anymore...The only time I can think of that happening recently was when Microsoft shipped off infected CDs or something to a foreign country, shrugs

Yeah, it could happen, since people, even programmers, had no experience with virii that time and everyone trusted each others disks.

Yes, or anything else like "satan is here with you"

Hehe, have a virus that writes "Got Root?" on the screen, heh.