Virus Writers Reply Personally we [Australian Parasite and me] think the Aussie virus scene is in an OK kind of state at the moment. There are not many of us here that write viruses, and some are just lammers rehashing other people's work. We never really could understand the paranoia that surrounds them. It's just a little piece of code, but to see the faces of people when they say "Oh my God, I've got a virus, I'll have to reformat my 600Gb hard disk" is great. It's unbeleivable how badly people react. It separates the men/women from the boys/girls. The easiest way to remove a virus is to get one of the virus writers to write you an antidote. It's very simple and painless. All it takes is a copy of the virus to analyse. We'd also like to blow away the myth of "pirates get what they deserve". Viruses are less likely to travel on pirated games than the shareware stuff from bulletin board systems. Why ? Because most of the sysops who run underground boards aren't morons. How often do you hear about people getting hit by pirated games compared to trojan shareware utilities ? The exception to this was when Nuke worked their way through INC and THG. Look at the amount of trojans around now. They are mostly shareware stuff: few, if any, are games. Of course the Anti-Virus folk benefit. We don't get any money from doing this but they do. They live off us. And don't say that if there were no viruses there would be no anti-virus programmers. If the anti's stopped updating scanners then we (the Australian Institute if Hackers) would consider this victory and cease to write them. This one of the reasons why we create viruses. To create, mutate, live, travel and experience. Stephen W. Hawkins defends our actions: in his eyes we create artificial life forms. And that comes from a highly regarded scientist. Pam Keanes' comments that viruses could not be the work of kids bewilders me. I learnt assembler when I was 15. Writing a virus is a very easy thing to do. A simple memory resident, non-overwriting COM infector would take 10 mintues to write from scratch. Stealth is also a pretty easy thing to develop. It's like writing a cheat mode - you only have to trap and monitor. Dark Avenger's MTE is good, but no virus writer worth their salt willingly uses other peoples code: only lammers do this. Studying it and modifying it severely is another matter altogether, and is not seen as an act of 'lammerism'. In our expert opinion we think Scan 2.0 is the best detection program -- here's ou quick rundown. Scan 2.0: Quick, scans more than any other and cleans pretty good too. Easier to trojanise than the old style Scan. Vbuster: Not too bad. A nice range of utilities most people will never use. Detects quite a few, and cleans a couple. VET: Too few options, and kludgy to use. Does not scan many at all. Norton: Nice menu system, but too expensive and does not detect as many as Scan 2. MS Anti-Virus: Wouldn't trust this as far as we could throw it. CPAV was bad, but this cut-down version is dire. Finds few, cleans even less and too much hassle to update. Thunderbyte: We hate it! 'DARK FIBER' Australian Institute of Hackers