I have a friend who claims never to have had a virus etc. because he doesn't
use AV software etc.
He honestly believes that the writers of AV software, antispyware software
etc. are the very people who write such viruses and stuff and maybe imbed it
in their products - or at least falsely report it. I've always retorted how
would you know if you had a virus or not?
I still recall the very first virus I encountered. I was a programer working
for a software house (aound 1982-ish) and a school sent us a nasty letter
saying the disk we shipped to them had a virus on it. We checked, and sure
enough - it had one! We checked others we'd shipped and they had it too.
Further investigation showed that the virus originated from the disk
duplication company we were using. Recalling ALL our disks (including all
the 100s of different types of programs we put out) damaged the reputation
of our company more than anybody's puter or software and I was asigned the
task of tackling viruses. My brief was to find a way to detect viruses and
protect our disks and I was given a room with a couple of PCs running on an
isolated LAN - and left to it. I wrote a couple of viruses to check how to
stop them - and decided it would be a very risky and full-time task for a
team of programmers and wrote a long and detailed report detailing the
difficulties and why we should sign up with a security company dedicated to
cambatting viruses - so we signed up with Dr. Solomon. The problem of
detecting and fighting viruses was worse for us since, being a software
house, we were using code-viewers, editors, assemblers/disassemblers,
compilers and linkers all the time which, of course, were continuously
examining and modifying executable files and data files and generally
exhibiting much of the same activity and behaviour as viruses! But I had an
interesting 3 months writing nasty programs and ways to stop them and have
always taken such matters seriously since I've experienced first hand the
trouble and chaos a virus causes an organisation - even if the virus itself
is pretty much harmless.
BTW I think that first virus was the 'form' virus. I also found a virus
(Timothy) in one the technicians games (the place where I worked also
designed and produced hardware and the programmers and technicians
departments had a friendly rivalry thing going on).
BTW we immediately stopped using duplicating companies and hand-duplicated
and checked tens of 1000s of floppy disks - not much fun I can assure you!
Allan
PS No trees were harmed in the sending of this message and a very large
number of electrons were asked their permission to be terribly
inconvenienced. (And threw a party for them afterwards for being really cool
about it).
Disrupting the unnatural balance that you, as a conscious human being and a
confused mass of energy, have created.
-Disturb the mind -
>From: Moose <olymoose@xxxxxxxxx>
>Reply-To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxx
>To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxx
>Subject: [OM] Re: OT Lavasoft news
>Date: Sat, 09 Dec 2006 02:13:34 -0800
>
>Brian Swale wrote:
> > Hi all
> >
> > Here's an url to Lavasoft news.
> > http://tinyurl.com/yacqfo
> > The details of trojans, malware and what-not are horrifying
> >
>Has it occurred to you that fear increases their sales?
>
>I'm not suggesting that those threats don't exist, but that a vendor of
>products to protect them has good reason to play them up.
>
>Moose
>
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