5 ms·

Why some computer viruses refuse to die

65 points by goldminer88 8y ago

speeder 8y ago
One past incident I had: I was working as intern in a tech support company. We had there some 1.44mb discs with the game "Lotus III", so whenever we were bored we would play a little. One day I arrived at work... And they were scrambling all over the place using ancient antivirus from same era as Lotus III... Found out we played that game on tons of random computers and it was infected with a DOS vírus that could actually copy itself to USB drives too... Whooops. We caused outbreak of what was then an already obsolete virus. (Most of the machines had windows 98 in them at best... The virus worked on then surprisingly fine despite being intended for DOS, and in those machines specifically it would infect USB)
- jaclaz 8y ago
  >We caused outbreak of what was then an already obsolete virus. (Most of the machines had windows 98 in them at best... The virus worked on then surprisingly fine despite being intended for DOS, and in those machines specifically it would infect USB) Well, windows 98 was essentially a GUI over DOS, so that is not at all "strange", what is more strange is the effect on USB, most probably the virus would affect any mounted volume (at filesystem/mount level as opposed to disk/mass storage). As a side note, in my time (only slightly earlier) Lotus (more properly Lotus 1-2-3) was not at all a game but rather the "only" spreadsheet program available, what a number of people would now call "an Excel spreadsheet" was at the time a "Lotus spreadsheet".
  - speeder 8y ago
    Lotus series was some cool racing games that actually were intended for Amiga, the DOS version not being just as good, but to me were still mind blowing. Later when they were making a sequel it ended in Super Nintendo, with cars changed (Lotus in the title referred to the car company) due to license issues, spawning Top Gear series. Lotus and Top Gear were wildly popular in Brazil, and thus recently a Brazilian studio made a spiritual sucessor (including hiring the otigibaly musician to make more of his very iconic music) that is named "Horizon Chase", so if you curious about what is so fun in "Lotus" to spread a virus, play Horizon Chase, gameplay is almost identical actually.
dingo_bat 8y ago
It has always seemed like an unending battle to me. The only way this ends is to make an AI antivirus that can decide whether a particular software is malicious or not.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > an AI antivirus That already exists, and has existed for many years, it's called 'heuristics'. Not quite as buzzwordy without hanging 'AI' on it though.

65 points by goldminer88 8y ago

One past incident I had: I was working as intern in a tech support company. We had there some 1.44mb discs with the game "Lotus III", so whenever we were bored we would play a little. One day I arrived at work... And they were scrambling all over the place using ancient antivirus from same era as Lotus III... Found out we played that game on tons of random computers and it was infected with a DOS vírus that could actually copy itself to USB drives too... Whooops. We caused outbreak of what was then an already obsolete virus. (Most of the machines had windows 98 in them at best... The virus worked on then surprisingly fine despite being intended for DOS, and in those machines specifically it would infect USB)

jaclaz 8y ago
>We caused outbreak of what was then an already obsolete virus. (Most of the machines had windows 98 in them at best... The virus worked on then surprisingly fine despite being intended for DOS, and in those machines specifically it would infect USB) Well, windows 98 was essentially a GUI over DOS, so that is not at all "strange", what is more strange is the effect on USB, most probably the virus would affect any mounted volume (at filesystem/mount level as opposed to disk/mass storage). As a side note, in my time (only slightly earlier) Lotus (more properly Lotus 1-2-3) was not at all a game but rather the "only" spreadsheet program available, what a number of people would now call "an Excel spreadsheet" was at the time a "Lotus spreadsheet".
- speeder 8y ago
  Lotus series was some cool racing games that actually were intended for Amiga, the DOS version not being just as good, but to me were still mind blowing. Later when they were making a sequel it ended in Super Nintendo, with cars changed (Lotus in the title referred to the car company) due to license issues, spawning Top Gear series. Lotus and Top Gear were wildly popular in Brazil, and thus recently a Brazilian studio made a spiritual sucessor (including hiring the otigibaly musician to make more of his very iconic music) that is named "Horizon Chase", so if you curious about what is so fun in "Lotus" to spread a virus, play Horizon Chase, gameplay is almost identical actually.

dingo_bat 8y ago

It has always seemed like an unending battle to me. The only way this ends is to make an AI antivirus that can decide whether a particular software is malicious or not.

craftyguy 8y ago
> an AI antivirus That already exists, and has existed for many years, it's called 'heuristics'. Not quite as buzzwordy without hanging 'AI' on it though.