Re: [CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO] virus warning

paul@... wrote:

> I recently ran across a paper written by a few guys out of europe
> that discusses the practical basis of writing a multisystem
> polymorphic worm tagetable to a specific mission.

If you mean "crossplatform" when you say "multisystem," they you are
correct. Software can be written against a specific bytecode like
x86, Java or .NET's forthcoming standard.

> After the mission is accomplished, the worm disappears. They were
> able to build one after a couple of months of effort.
> It has not been released; this was not a hacker effort.
> Well, we don't think it was released :-)

Even research efforts have to be careful. A Taiwanese student went
to jail after some colleagues of his took his research and unleashed
it on the Internet. The names escaping me (begins with a C), but it
still comes around here and there -- it wipes out your BIOS.

> On the other hand, it bolsters my conviction that folks who are
> sufficiently good can do pretty much whatever they want.

Especially on platforms that automate everything.

> I would expect that most intelligence agencies have tools like
> this in their arsenal. You only see the worms and virii put out
> by amateurs and vandals.

That's quite an incorrect statement. Most black hat hackers are
usually unemployed, for various reasons including age, work ethic
and/or live in a country with a poor economy. In the case of the
latter two, don't dismiss them as amateurs or vandals for one
minute. 99.99% of viruses are benign -- even those ones that
supposedly cause "billions of dollars of damage." Imagine if
someone had actually put a payload in them.

You see a war break out, you can expect some people to be a little
less shy about putting in a payload.

-- TheBS

--
Bryan "TheBS" Smith mailto:b.j.smith@... chat:thebs413
Engineer AbsoluteValue Systems, Inc. http://www.linux-wlan.org
President SmithConcepts, Inc. http://www.SmithConcepts.com