When Viruses Infect Worms 96
An anonymous reader writes "Bitdefender reports that there exist viruses which, when they encounter other viruses, will merge and combine effects so that they create a new virus. 'A virus infects executable files; and a worm is an executable file. If the virus reaches a PC already compromised by a worm, the virus will infect the exe files on that PC — including the worm. When the worm spreads, it will carry the virus with it. Although this happens unintentionally, the combined features from both pieces of malware will inflict a lot more damage than the creators of either piece of malware intended. While most file infectors have inbuilt spreading mechanisms, just like Trojans and worms (spreading routines for RDP, USB, P2P, chat applications, or social networks), some cannot replicate or spread between computers. And it seems a great idea to “outsource” the transportation mechanism to a different piece of malware (i.e. by piggybacking a worm).'"
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Naw, I bet it's a script, makes replying useless. /. should tag a few parts of the spam so that when posted it receives an error and doesn't successfully post. Even if they just put the restriction in temporarily it should still have the appropriate effect. I'm rather surprised they haven't done that yet.
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I think it's because there is no one left to care about it. /. is on life-support administration-wise.
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Make it so the first comment to any new post has to be from a named account.
My really bad C# pseudo-code:
DataTable c = "SELECT Count[Comments] FROM [Posts] WHERE [POST] = '" + currentarticle + "'";
if(Long.Parse(c[0][0].ToString()) 1 && UserID == "Anonymous Coward")
{
return "Please login with a named account to comment on this post, or wait until someone else with a named account posts a comment.";
}
Gets the idea across, I think.
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Also, why would you convert a perfectly good number to a string? Bloody XML generation...
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Hmm. Perhaps a flag on a different table, yes, that could work.
And the casting ToString() then parsing it is just a reflex, I guess. Getting things in and out of a DataTable requires, in my experience, casting to a data type, and casting to a string, then parsing it tends to work for everything (hence the reflex).
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Naw, I bet it's a script, makes replying useless. /. should tag a few parts of the spam so that when posted it receives an error and doesn't successfully post. Even if they just put the restriction in temporarily it should still have the appropriate effect. I'm rather surprised they haven't done that yet.
That never occurred to me, yeah, that would be easy to do.
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I've seen it implemented elsewhere. Not hard for spammers to get past, but my assumption is that you break the script and he'll lay off until he has some other bullshit to preach about and then he'll do a new script.
If the block on a certain combination of key words is only up for a few days it would do its job without too many problems.
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As for TFA before any of the lame "Use Linux" karma whores show up as someone who actually fixes the thing when they get pwned 6 days a week I'd just like to point out that since XP SP2 a lot of the machines getting pwned were PEBKAC and after Vista the vast majority were PEBKAC and with 7 its almost 100% PEBKAC and sadly no OS can magically protect you from stupid people.
Hey I use Linux you insensitive sod!
It's not about OS choice - it's about market share. The morons have a monopoly (it's a mainstay of evolution). So what ever product (food, technology, whatever) is the most popular will inevitably suck because the users influence the product - if it didn't suck to begin with - it will pretty soon.
What some call fanbois/nerds/geeks are just morons who focus their limited abilities on a small range of subjects. The my phone is smaller/my phone OS is better is less a sign of
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You noticed I wasn't disagreeing with what you said about MS? (a product I don't use except when required)
I always preferred " elitist assholes having a giant circle jerk" but i'm told that is a little on the crude side and one should always try to improve one's vocabulary.
Should one also wear a tiara, and, leave a trail of Oxford commas after ones self?
And I wasn't trying to disparage Linux,
I didn't think you were.
i personally like it for embedded and webservers, i was simply trying to beat to the punch the obvious "Freetard" posts we get on any windows subject. you know the ones, bullshit like "Linux never gets viruses!" or the completely pointless "Use Linux' when the entire TFA has nothing whatever to do with Linux or FOSS.
Butt, butt, butt their opinion is important. Need. To. Show. I. Am. Cutting. Edge.
Remember, they've made an enormous emotional investment in their ability to pick the Superior Magic®. If they were wrong... then their whole ability to intuitively understand complex subjects is called into quest
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no one gives a fuck about your conspiracy theory
Mental Image (Score:5, Funny)
Did anyone else get a mental image of a bacterium waving a cowboy hat riding a giant sandworm? ...clearly I need more coffee.
Re:Mental Image (Score:4, Funny)
I think you need LESS coffee.
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less is more
less = more
"I need more coffee" =
"I "+"need " + "more" + " coffee" =
"I "+"need " + "less" + " coffee" =
"I need less coffee"
Re:Mental Image (Score:5, Funny)
Whatever you are taking, you need either more or less of it. The current dosage isn't working out.
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decaf is the devils urine.
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Virus != Bacterium
Re:oh shit! (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, how about when a known virus infects an unknown worm? That should help the AV program to recognize the worm as undesirable.
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...and disinfect the worm, allowing it to proceed on it's merry way.
YO DAWG, (Score:2, Offtopic)
We also replaced you coffee with Folger's meth crystals(tm), and got chocolate in your peanut butter. It's two, two mints in one!
Digital evolution at work (Score:5, Funny)
Only a million trillion times faster than it happens in the real world. I for one welcome our sentient viral overlords.
Re:Digital evolution at work (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Digital evolution at work (Score:5, Insightful)
Digital Intelligent Design at work you mean... These programs weren't created by /dev/null you know...
It's true that the programs were not read from /dev/null fully formed, however the evolutionary process wasn't directly designed by humans either -- It was a natural product of automated data replication systems existing. Much like the first self replicating chemical chain's existence spawned life. It's fun to point to our involvement in the program's initial creation, but that's just about like pointing to a star and calling it an "intelligent designer" because it forged the atoms.
If you've never done so I suggest you do a little light AI programming. Feed Forward neural networks aren't hard to setup. When coupled with bitwise genetic programming that applies selection pressure and "breeds" new generations of N.Nets from the best "survivors" you can literally watch emergent behavior occur. This is how I taught a simple AI to move toward food sources and avoid dangers, and how I taught a bit more complex AI to recognize numbers and letters. The latter was only more complex in that it had more inputs and outputs, hidden layers, and thus a larger genome -- All used exactly the same AI architecture, the additional "complexity" was due to different initial construction parameters.
Yank my fingernails out and beat me with a harmer, I still couldn't tell you exactly how their "programming" achieves their behaviors -- The AI neural networks initially had randomized states. I can tell you the overall process, but not the "design" of their synaptic pathways -- No one actually "programmed" my OCR's AI... It was evolved instead.
If an intelligent designer, like myself, can impose artificial selection pressure to cause some degree of behavioral evolution among n.nets, or against mice to shrink their tails, then it's easy to understand that the designer need not exist: If only the dumb environment exerts selection pressures evolution will occur.
Let me put it this way: The malware designers didn't intend for the virus to infect the worm -- They didn't intelligently design this behavior. If this proves beneficial to the duplication of their data against a natural selection pressure of their environment, like AV scanners or computer network configurations, then the new combined data set "organism" has been evolved, not designed.
IMHO, the existence of initial conditions for (AI) life does not prove the existence of an intelligent designer as the initial conditions could exist naturally for such life: Eg malware running amok on the Internet vs carefully evolved n.nets in a lab... Even if you assert that either is indeed a product of Intelligent Design, then you must also agree they were not programmed by /dev/null nor merely by humans at /dev/console, rather the actual programming came from /dev/random. (Which is literally true in the case of my OCR's AI.)
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Digital Intelligent Design at work you mean... These programs weren't created by /dev/null you know...
But, how can we know that they were not created by /dev/random?
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Windows is a petri dish.
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normally i don't post xkcd on her usually because someone else already has.
http://xkcd.com/350/ [xkcd.com]
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just to scroll down farther to find out some one else said it first damn.
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Only a million trillion times faster than it happens in the real world. I for one welcome our sentient viral overlords.
I sympathize with your enthusiasm, but evolution of computer viruses is actually a million trillion times slower than in real life, because the "environment" in which the "random genetic mutations" occur is the much smaller and slower-moving world of man-made software. In real life, you've got a lot more space, time, and degrees of freedom, and the motion of atoms in DNA molecules is much faster than the clock of any computer.
Bah... (Score:5, Funny)
I don't believe for a second that it's possible for a virus and a worm to combine to produce a more dange
Another XKCD image (Score:1)
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No kidding. This is just about the most ludicrous claim ever. Come on /. editors. You can do better than to let such an absurd article through.
Wow! Old news is so exciting! (Score:2, Informative)
Remember back in the days when BackOrifice used to come with a CIH payload?
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Ahhhh... CIH1019... I remember it well.
(Waxes nostalgic.)
Shockwave Rider (Score:3, Interesting)
Why does this bring back vague memories of that John Brunner classic, "The Shockwave Rider"? It's been about 30 years since I read it, so I can't recall if the protagonist wrote a "worm" that infected another worm, or just destroyed it/replaced it or something.
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Did the infection come across in a Flash?
uh, yeah (Score:1)
cool story, bro
Context Switching in Viruses and Bacteria (Score:2, Informative)
Context switching in biology allows viruses to infest genomes of many sizes.
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/GeneMachine/51835
Mamaviruses have a Sputnik virus that reporgrams the Mamavirus which reporgrams an amoeba.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamavirus
CRISPR is how bacteria learn to modify their immune system to respond to viruses.
CRISPR may be the first example of a memory system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR
This memory may have lead to a bio side effect called intelligence.
Combined with quorum sens
Biological viruses and worms (Score:5, Funny)
Did anyone else start reading the summary assuming it was a story on biology? Here's how I first read it:
"Bitdefender reports that there exist viruses which, when they encounter other viruses, will merge and combine effects so that they create a new virus. 'A virus infects executable flies;
Instead of staring at the word "flies" which was actually "files", instead my eyes backed up and were focused on executable. What did it mean for a fly to be executable?
Re:Biological viruses and worms (Score:5, Funny)
What did it mean for a fly to be executable?
It has an x chromosome.
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No silly! Execution usually involves either an electric chair, leathal injections or a fireing squad.
Executable flies are flies that you can execute with a can of RAID.
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As long as you're good with a flyswatter
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What did it mean for a fly to be executable?
Tiny guillotines.
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Your interpretation sounds buggy.
Windows ME (Score:1)
on that POS getting a BSOD when this good (Score:2)
on that POS getting a BSOD when software trys to do this may be a good thing as the system can crash before it can do real damage
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You use that? you're braver then I thought.
Swift (Score:2)
So nat'ralists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey,
And these have smaller fleas that bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum.
--Jonathan Swift.
Double Malware (Score:2)
What does it mean!?
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Double Malware
[Ottoman's voice]
"You know that malware.... that's like....Double Malware??"
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I'm not saying it's double malware but...
it's double malware.
Emergent behaviour (Score:2)
is always creepy.
Si, we have a software then can change other software to create a 3rd new working piece OS software.
Sounds like life to me.
This is not new(s) (Score:1)
This has been a known reality for a very long time. I remember discussing this exact subject with colleagues over lunch easily over a dozen years ago.
More interesting, perhaps, is that you can even get completely new viruses--which may or may not be viable--when one virus overwrites the loader and/or data of another. Things reminiscent of the "biology" of synthetic life simulators like the ALife.
It's not just virus-to-worm combinations. I'm sure that even before my friend noted its possibility, that the
XKCD (Score:2)
Phages are next! (Score:2)
oh the strange and odd wanderings of a shockwave rider...
subject (Score:2)
By our powers combined!
Not in the wild (Score:2)
I guess it's theoretically possible, but in practice it's been a long time since I've seen a executable infecting virus. The last ones were macro viruses.
My guess is that executable viruses aren't really found in the wild anymore.