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Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

blogs.avg.com

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Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#31

Post by EricR23 »

inportb wrote: post #29
EricR23 wrote: post #15

When I was a teenager I found it fun to intentionally infect myself with malware and try to study it. I know realize this wasn't the most responsible thing to do, as I wasn't in a sandboxed environment, but it was a great learning experience and taught me a lot about networking and security. One of the biggest malwares I ever managed to infect myself with was a bot, which caused my computer to become a zombie on a ~1…

> I tried a "hello" and waited. And waited. And then I was k-lined from the IRC network. The next day when I logged onto my computer, I found my Internet connectivity was being overwhelmed with bogus TCP requests. I'd probably do the same, upon discovering that one of my bots had become sentient.

I'm sure. I'm not exactly surprised that it happened now ;)

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#32

Post by strictfp »

kehrlann wrote: post #30
strictfp wrote: post #23

Alternative title: Amateur virus analyst does not take necessary precautions, gets pwned by virus author.

Not all of us are professional virus analysts. No need to mock him, his post is worth reading for mere amateurs like myself.

True. Just find it odd that this gets posted on the official blog. Interesting indeed, but a bit careless.

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#33

Post by coreygoodie »

inportb wrote: post #29
EricR23 wrote: post #15

When I was a teenager I found it fun to intentionally infect myself with malware and try to study it. I know realize this wasn't the most responsible thing to do, as I wasn't in a sandboxed environment, but it was a great learning experience and taught me a lot about networking and security. One of the biggest malwares I ever managed to infect myself with was a bot, which caused my computer to become a zombie on a ~1…

> I tried a "hello" and waited. And waited. And then I was k-lined from the IRC network. The next day when I logged onto my computer, I found my Internet connectivity was being overwhelmed with bogus TCP requests. I'd probably do the same, upon discovering that one of my bots had become sentient.

Exactly what I would have done. DC'ed and headed for the closest bunker.

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#34

Post by simonbrown »

strictfp wrote: post #23

Alternative title: Amateur virus analyst does not take necessary precautions, gets pwned by virus author.

How did he get pwned or not take necessary precautions? He could have re-imaged it after running the virus to prevent something like this from happening (assuming that's how it did), but it was all in a virtual machine, so there wasn't much risk to not doing it.

Disclaimer: I'm not a professional virus analyst.

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#35

Post by Andrenid »

waffle_ss wrote: post #10

Well, back in my pre-teen script kiddie days of using BO2K/Netbus and early Sub7 builds I was on the other side of the screen. Sub7 I recall distinctly had all the listed features and a lot more - keylogging, chat client, webcam viewing, screen capture, open/closing CD tray, etc. There was a GUI interface that would let you select any of the above features that would create a payload that could be injected into any .…

I used to do the same stuff, we didn't even see it as malicious back then, just a "prank" really. Most the people we "infected" were via IRC and ICQ, embedding the exe client into a JPG (or just changing the exe icon to a JPG one) and DCC'ing it to them.

Once infected, we'd screw around, make errors pop up on their screen like "Computer Is Low On Coffee, Please Insert Coffee Cup" then make CD tray eject, etc. Then we'd chat to them, and they usually had a good laugh, and we'd tell them how to not get infected in the future, then self-destruct the client.

We didn't really investigate it much or ponder the deeper implications behind it, so it took us a fair while to realise the level of maliciousness that was possible, which scared us off, so we stopped messing with it (we'd already been in trouble for other stuff so didn't want to push it!)

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#36

Post by agumonkey »

strebler wrote: post #14
waffle_ss wrote: post #10

Well, back in my pre-teen script kiddie days of using BO2K/Netbus and early Sub7 builds I was on the other side of the screen. Sub7 I recall distinctly had all the listed features and a lot more - keylogging, chat client, webcam viewing, screen capture, open/closing CD tray, etc. There was a GUI interface that would let you select any of the above features that would create a payload that could be injected into any .…

I was reading that article thinking "I remember all of those features (and more) being in Sub7 about 12-13 years ago". Not so advanced, really.

Did BO2K/Sub7 allowed to be notified when being debugged ? Maybe it's an easy 'plugin' to write when you have a flexible payload generator I guess.

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#37

Post by baby »

Reminds me of those good times when we discovered Trojan me and my friends. We kept infecting people, until they found out about it and started doing it as well. It became a war between us. Almost everyone got infected in our class.

I remember the pranks we used to pull, like printing "Help me I'm trapped inside the printer!", changing the wallpaper for a porn one, typing messages instead of the person on MSN.

Once we infected some random guy we didn't know, and popped up a black chat screen (like the one in matrix) and before we could write "Hi Neo" the guy was already writing to us "hey what's up?". The guy was so stupid he chatted with us like it was a normal thing.

Then we all grew up and we fell a bit bad for finding stuff we shouldn't have found, so we stopped.

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#38

Post by raintrees »

Back a bit (yes, I am dating myself here), I worked for a floppy disk duplicating company that was hired by a certain software company to attempt to duplicate the disks with built-in copy protection. The customer provided a routine where they would have the end-users' disk controllers read a hidden half sector at the end of a half-sized normal ninth sector, I think was the gist of that particular scheme.

If I remember correctly, they had typed some example code in plain ascii, so we obliged with the typical "help, I'm being held captive in a Chinese disk duplication company." Which was almost true, as the owners of our company were of Chinese decent. And in my defense, we did have a number of all-nighters (with Pizza) when another software company would call us with a sudden "we've changed the masters - erase and re-dupe whatever you have)." I was younger, then...

Anyway, a few messages were passed back and forth this way, before we got back to serious business and implemented the copy protection scheme. Not really a virus, but still geeky fun.

Did you know that 8" floppy disks had excellent aerobatic qualities when flung from the top of a building? The trick was holding them by the corner during the wind-up...

Re: Have you ever chatted with a hacker within a virus?

#39

Post by baby »

waffle_ss wrote: post #10

Well, back in my pre-teen script kiddie days of using BO2K/Netbus and early Sub7 builds I was on the other side of the screen. Sub7 I recall distinctly had all the listed features and a lot more - keylogging, chat client, webcam viewing, screen capture, open/closing CD tray, etc. There was a GUI interface that would let you select any of the above features that would create a payload that could be injected into any .…

> so it was pretty easy to trick people into opening an infected .exe.

I remember telling this guy it was a fake virus (the jokes you could download on internet before) and that he had to turn off his anti virus to launch it. It worked.

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