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[OM] Re: OT Lavasoft news

Subject: [OM] Re: OT Lavasoft news
From: "Allan Mee" <bigalsgroups@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 09 Dec 2006 15:11:26 +0000
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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