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I'm having difficulty finding any authoritative or historical resources on this, but I recall that "good" viruses were for some time planned that would do just

by csydas 10y ago

I'm having difficulty finding any authoritative or historical resources on this, but I recall that "good" viruses were for some time planned that would do just that: Run around, see if they could infect via the method, then patch and self-destruct. Ultimately the idea was considered not good because of difficulties with getting it to work as expected, pressure and fear that the fix would introduce more issues, liability issues, and so on, and probably some ethics debates on computer intrusion even for the purpose of securing the device. I'm not really sure what stance to take on such an issue, since the idea behind it is good intentions, but I feel like it can lead to unintended consequences that ultimately would have no one liable. For my personal machines I have fairly vanilla setups, but many of my friends and colleagues have rahter intentionally complex set ups and most definitely would object to someone accessing their set up and making changes without their permission.

marcosdumay 10y ago
I remember a history¹ about one that was tried. It just took down the university network where it was placed. 1 - I'm sure it is in one of my undergrad textbooks. In other words, no way I'll find it again.
- rst 10y ago
  Sounds like Welchia. See, e.g., here: http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3065761/Friendly+Welchia+Worm+Wreaking+Havoc.htm http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3065761/Fri...
  - wwwigham 10y ago
    > "Increased ICMP traffic" Wow. If a virus propergated like this on today's networks, would such traffic event make a noticable dent in the available bandwidth? Anyways, I hadn't heard of this virus - it's super neat. Patching its own infection vector and even explicitly removing an existing virus from the target machine... The article loathes it for how overtly it affects machines (forced restart to apply an update) and networks (congestion), but the work it attempted to do was decidedly good. Sounds to me like it worked well, but had poor execution in accounting for the network effects it would have. (I doubt it was rigorously tested in a prod environment ;) ) If anything, I'd see this as a case study that this kind of offense-as-defense strategy has the potential to work... Its just nobody wants to take responsibility to do so.

by csydas 10y ago

marcosdumay 10y ago

I remember a history¹ about one that was tried. It just took down the university network where it was placed. 1 - I'm sure it is in one of my undergrad textbooks. In other words, no way I'll find it again.

rst 10y ago
Sounds like Welchia. See, e.g., here: http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3065761/Friendly+Welchia+Worm+Wreaking+Havoc.htm http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3065761/Fri...
- wwwigham 10y ago
  > "Increased ICMP traffic" Wow. If a virus propergated like this on today's networks, would such traffic event make a noticable dent in the available bandwidth? Anyways, I hadn't heard of this virus - it's super neat. Patching its own infection vector and even explicitly removing an existing virus from the target machine... The article loathes it for how overtly it affects machines (forced restart to apply an update) and networks (congestion), but the work it attempted to do was decidedly good. Sounds to me like it worked well, but had poor execution in accounting for the network effects it would have. (I doubt it was rigorously tested in a prod environment ;) ) If anything, I'd see this as a case study that this kind of offense-as-defense strategy has the potential to work... Its just nobody wants to take responsibility to do so.