Viruses nowadays

As much as viruses are more common to find on a windows computer compared to like 20 years before, they are not AS destructive as the old ones. I mean the old viruses would like reformat your hard drive, delete files etc etc. Now most of the biggest viruses merely takeover your computer or try to downloading more spyware etc. I think the taking over viruses are the most common. Although there are still a couple of viruses that still do destructive work like that one virus I heard that would delete all your mp3s or rename them randomly.

Viruses are becoming a lucrative business for criminals, that's why.

A virus that destroys its host system will not be able to spread.
On the other hand a virus that does no damage to its host system can use it as a base for propagating to other networks without the owner ever knowing about it.

Indeed. What's worse is that "viruses" (actually worms or trojans) are being used more now for stuff like spamming (turning your PC into a so-called "zombie"), distributed denial of service attacks, or the theft of personal information. Seems there are two kinds of mentality among the virus writers - the ones who want to cause as much havoc and inconvenience for people as possible, and the ones who just want to show off their "1337 5ki11z" by spreading their work as far and wide as they can, a sort of electronic graffitti, if you will. Not that one is any better than the other, but the criminally-motivated ones are rather more sinister. If anything, having your credit card or banking details stolen by a rogue program can be more damaging than having files deleted. And there are the diallers, too, where innocent people have ended up with phone bills in the order of thousands of pounds because of a dialler program connecting to premium and/or international rate numbers.

On the subject, the funniest old-school virus I remember was the "Casino" virus, which ran on boot and forced you to play a jackpot game, and which wiped your FAT if you lost. Yikes!

http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/analyses/casino.html

Bah, viruses today are not a threat other than spamming my Internet. Back in the good old times, you could get infected without knowing. Now you have to do something really stupid, like running a trojan ("Chick with tits.cpl", "freesex.com", "wanna_cyber.txt.pif"), use Internet Explorer, get connected unfirewalled, etc.

CIH. That was fucking win for a virus. Last virus I caught. I had ran an antivirus to this CD, but the virus was pretty new and it didn't find it (it did, one week later). By running the Win32 executable it loaded. Then it would automatically infect all executables based on file operations, i.e. you didn't even have to run them! After some time it'd do REAL damage: blast your Flash BIOS if it can. Compare that to spamming, lol. And wait, here's the best part: the virus didn't increase the file size, as it split itself in many parts and overwrote padding space between objects left by the Win32 PE linker! Now that's what I call a virus. What we have today is more like luser traps. The people who gets infected shouldn't be admin in a computer, that's all.

>>5
BTW, I may have sounded like I'm proud of destructive viruses. Computer viruses are written by stupid fucks and brought nothing but trouble, but at least, viruses of old didn't insult my intelligence. Today, if you get anything, you almost deserve it.

>>5
>>6
True, true. I mean, look at the sorry mess that was the Sasser worm (and a number of others that exploited remote procedure calls) - sure, it spread without you having to actually do anything (assuming you weren't firewalled and hadn't applied the security patch), but the stupid thing just caused the machine to shut down, limiting its own capacity to spread. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

The big trouble is that most users aren't aware enough of the threats, or how to neutralise them, that they are incapable of defending themselves against them. I've seen customers whose virus checker subscriptions expired three or four years previously, yet they still assume they're protected. Thank goodness for AVG Free, I say - I can just install it for them, set it to self-update and forget about it.

Anyone remember BiOS viruses? Now those were DEADLY.

We need more viruses that utilize the brake on the HDD.

We need more viruses that can withstand a format (its possible) and never show up to an anti-virus ever. Now THAT would be fun :)

>>10
While it would be hard, they could have code to modify formatting utilities on the fly to install themselves back, as well as booting from any boot sectors, but this still doesn't make them infallible (you may very well boot with a clean diskette and format).

Eventually, an anti-virus would be able to detect any kind of virus.

zMist came close to being unidentifyable to virus scanners. It took a long time before they finally figured out how to catch it.

>>11
not if the virus itself kept updating with the anti-virus software...

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