4 ms·
I wonder if instead of focusing a handful of courses on virus making we shouldn't instead re-brand the the whole endeavour with a more positive spin and focus o
by Renaud 13y ago
I wonder if instead of focusing a handful of courses on virus making we shouldn't instead re-brand the the whole endeavour with a more positive spin and focus on something that could be called 'nanogens' for instance, whose modus operandi would be identical to viruses, but their purpose would be to protect against their harmful counterpart and repair the host instead.
- phaus 13y agoThere is already malware that "protects" the host by detecting and eliminating other malware. The idea is that if you keep the user's system clean (except for your malware) then you will evade detection more easily. If, as you suggested, someone released a virus designed to fix a person's computer, it would still be harmful in principle because you are making the assumption that people want strangers executing code on their machines.
- userbinator 13y ago> because you are making the assumption that people want strangers executing code on their machines Except that's pretty much what happens every time you visit a website with JS enabled...
- thaumasiotes 13y agoThis didn't deserve a downvote...
- phaus 13y agoWithout context and purely based on technicality you are correct, yet in the frame of this conversation your comment doesn't make any sense. Clearly there is a difference between a benign website and a site that hosts code that knowingly takes control of the user's computer (regardless of the programmer's intentions).
- marcosdumay 13y agoIt the old times when all virus came with a paper explaining how they worked, somebody tried that (but, of course, I don't remember any names to google, sorry). The "good" virus took down the network as well as the bad one, and the procedure was classified as harmfull since then. Nowadays we have some techiniques for restraining a virus, so that might work better... But then, we took the good parts of that virus and packaged on software that we deploy in a controled matter - we call that software anti-virus. There is no need to even test it anymore.
- syllogism 13y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welchia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welchia Used the same exploit as the blaster virus, patching the exploit on the host computer and self-propagating from it.