CS: Computer Security

[Albatross]

Recently, I have received a few PMs from a few people whose names I will not list asking me if I could help them with writing some malware. I tried to keep my responses as brief as possible while keeping them mildly amusing, but they could all be reduced to an almost unconditional "no".

That got me thinking a bit. Aside from games, one of the major things it seems that kids want to do with programming is to write malware, and for the world of me I just cannot understand why, even if I wrote some myself before. I wrote a remote-detonatable fork bomb as a theoretically harmless practical joke on a few friends, however the requests I got were more for keyloggers and spyware.

Why?!?

-Albatross

1000 posts, and counting.

[Incubbus]

Because limits are for stepping over them... Youth comes with the anti-mindest against the system that forces them into its needs and restricts them...

So why don´t lean up and break the restricitons?...

The forbidden is always interesting...




gratulamo tibi!:...





EDIT: The ones - that intend to wreak real havoc should be smart enough to know where to search for the functions and they should be interested in "how things workd"... But those who ask for malware are comparable to the homework-kids, which don´t want to think for themselves. <- No real Threat(at leats most of them) [In my opinion]

[Seraphimsan]

hey gais! Can you h3lp me write a malware. I need sum1 to rite the windows parts of it cause I dnt kno how 2 do tht....kthx.

[helios]

I'm curious. Did you reject them on ethical grounds, or because you didn't feel like bothering?
Anyone who has to ask something like that is already not worth my time, not even for a negative reply.

[Albatross]

Both, actually. I have a far more important program to write than those few pieces of malware combined, and if I helped those people then a few pieces of malicious code that I have no guarantees would be used in an ethical or psuedo-ethial context would be in their hands.

EDIT @Seraphimsan:
...not funny.

-Albatross

[Seraphimsan]

Sorry :O

[AngelHoof]

T's ok.. *gives Seraphimsan a cookie and a Free Malware Shopping Coupon*

[S6k9GNh0]

Because kids are bored and love to terrorize. It's like taking the wings off of a fly whenever he wants.

I've never made a virus nor malware but I have made it to where someone can't log on with some batch statements. That was funny since it worked on every computer in the school via preloaded network drives with startup folders. :D I still remember him going from computer to computer.

[firedraco]

I remember writing a batch file (replaced autoexec.bat or whatever it was called) that did something like this:

Print out "Drive corrupt error, autofix?"
Get input
Change prompt to "Current drive is no longer valid>"

My friend was like "WTF!?" until he typed dir and found it didn't actually do anything.

[chrisname]

Batch files always were fun.

:loop
call iexplore.exe
goto loop

Edit: Also, on *nix you could put

# Meanwhile, in the .bashrc...

if [[ -e /dev/hda ]]; then
	DEV="/dev/hda"
elif [[ -e /dev/sda ]]; then
	DEV="/dev/sda"
else
	DEV="/dev/mem"
fi

while [[ true ]]; do
	echo "bash: $DEV: Bad device."
	echo -n "$USER@`hostname`:~$ "
	read
done

in $HOME/.bashrc :P

[Albatross]

That's one painful yet obvious fork bomb.

-Albatross

[chrisname]

Hey, if a kid nuked his hard disk with a big magnet because someone told him to; anything's possible.

Edit: Another fun thing to do:
dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/mem bs=1024 count=1024
Writes 1048576 bytes into memory. It should trash the interrupt vectors at the start of memory so when an interrupt is called the whole system should pretty much just die.

The best part is it's only temporary. Once you reboot, it's fine. But if you're going to try it, make sure to do a sync first so that all your cached data is written to disk.

[Albatross]

Most of the code I wrote that could be considered malicious was intended as a harmless prank, and while I walked the line between harmless and harmful, I never intended to cause damage. I never launched anything that could spread, I never used keyloggers or spyware, and I never used my programs on anyone else than friends and family, and it was usually intended as a prank.

One of the funnier ones (due to the perfect timing of the effects of the program): Once I wrote a small program in FASM Assembly to send the CPU of a friend's computer into System Management Mode, turn off all the fans, and above all, keep them off (getting around the SMI Timeout was a problem, but I managed). It was payback for hanging a bucket of water over the door to his RV so that when I came in I got soaked. The outcome was that when he was playing some computer game that was heavy on system resources, the computer turned off to protect itself against the high internal temperature. I was laughing quite hard, because the temperature exceeded a critical point just as he was just beating the boss and the clock speed of the system plummeted. Fortunately, no hardware was severely damaged.

It's actually relieving, typing about it.

-Albatross

[helios]

A friend of mine once sent me a 5+ MiB batch file consisting of nothing but thousands of lines of start self.bat. This is a guy who had gone to the same technical school and specialty as me ("computing" which, to my complete disillusionment, turned out to be "system analysis-oriented") for three years, and by my count should have already had one or two years of college-level programming. Needless to say, I sent him back the few bytes that made up
:0
start self.bat
goto 0
with the appropriate curses (for making me download something so needlessly huge and for being a complete moron).
Later, I tried running the batch to see how much damage it would do, and to my own surprise the system survived! The video was wonky for a short while after I managed to kill the original process along with all its children, but I didn't need to reboot to regain full stability.

[chrisname]

What an idiot. So he spent five years "programming" and didn't even know what a loop was? Wow.

That's not even a loop, really; it's just an unconditional jump, but still...

[Albatross]

I guess (no offense to your friend, helios) he's one of those people who goes on programming forums and expects people to give him the answer, because if as chris said he doesn't know what a loop is (which I suspect)...

What makes me think he didn't know what a loop or unconditional jump was: How hard is it to use Google to find out?

-Albatross

[helios]

I guess (no offense to your friend, helios) he's one of those people who goes on programming forums and expects people to give him the answer

Maybe. I can't imagine him doing that, but I can't imagine him not doing that.

What makes me think he didn't know what a loop or unconditional jump was: How hard is it to use Google to find out?

The real question is what goes through the mind of someone who finds himself copying the same line thousands of times. It's beyond me.

The weirdest part is that not too long before or after that, he asked me a complicated question about floating point representation. I'm guessing something for Computer Organization.

[bubbleboys]

my friend somehow managed to physically destroy her computer by accident. This was quite some years ago and she said she was messing around with system pointers or something like that. Either ways, she thinks she accidentally randomly assigned a whole bunch of system pointers and her computer started acting funky first and she couldn't do very much with it. A short while later, the computer actually started smoking. She threw it in the freezer and it died in there.

I don't know how she managed to do that since I thought that, as someone mentioned earlier, computers have hardware protection against overheating (aka shutdown).

She was on a Sony VAIO laptop and it makes me wonder what exactly happened? Perhaps laptops in trying to save space keep the protection against overheating as firmware?

Anybody have any insight into what might have happened?

[helios]

Sounds like BS to me. Messing around with system internal structures will at most get you a BSoD.

[Duthomhas]

Just because two things happen at about the same time does not prove cause and effect...