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A dive into the world of MS-DOS viruses (2019)

blog.benjojo.co.uk

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Re: A dive into the world of MS-DOS viruses (2019)

#3
Interesting.

I've often wondered-- if you want to learn low level C and/or hacking techniques, would it make sense to start by hacking Ms-Dos? It's easy, there is little to no protection, even for system calls, and you can do a lot with little code.

Of course, there is no "practical" use, but it would be really interesting as a learning excercise.

I often thought of creating a few tutorials about this, but not sure if anyone cares... (or if anyone else has done so).

Re: A dive into the world of MS-DOS viruses (2019)

#5

Interesting. I've often wondered-- if you want to learn low level C and/or hacking techniques, would it make sense to start by hacking Ms-Dos? It's easy, there is little to no protection, even for system calls, and you can do a lot with little code. Of course, there is no "practical" use, but it would be really interesting as a learning excercise. I often thought of creating a few tutorials about this, but not sure i…

Most of it would cross-apply to embedded. Some of it would directly apply to whatever legacy SBC-level embedded applications out there are still running on DOS. Most people don't want to be in embedded, and even fewer want to do maintenance programming in embedded.

Re: A dive into the world of MS-DOS viruses (2019)

#6
I really admire techniques that were used on DOS viruses. Resident viruses that could hide themselves (stealth) and able to use boot as a transmission vector were very advanced. This combined with polymorphic techniques made the virus very resistant, basically reboot resistant.

Re: A dive into the world of MS-DOS viruses (2019)

#7
post #5

Interesting. I've often wondered-- if you want to learn low level C and/or hacking techniques, would it make sense to start by hacking Ms-Dos? It's easy, there is little to no protection, even for system calls, and you can do a lot with little code. Of course, there is no "practical" use, but it would be really interesting as a learning excercise. I often thought of creating a few tutorials about this, but not sure i…

Most of it would cross-apply to embedded. Some of it would directly apply to whatever legacy SBC-level embedded applications out there are still running on DOS. Most people don't want to be in embedded, and even fewer want to do maintenance programming in embedded.

yeah, but embedded is another beast. Lots of different boards/architectures, plus not all embedded devices use an OS, it's mostly (usually?) bare metal programming

Re: A dive into the world of MS-DOS viruses (2019)

#8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of it would cross-apply to embedded. Some of it would directly apply to whatever legacy SBC-level embedded applications out there are still running on DOS. Most people don't want to be in embedded, and even fewer want to do maintenance programming in embedded.

yeah, but embedded is another beast. Lots of different boards/architectures, plus not all embedded devices use an OS, it's mostly (usually?) bare metal programming

DOS programming could be caricatured as "bare metal with a file system".

Re: A dive into the world of MS-DOS viruses (2019)

#9

Interesting. I've often wondered-- if you want to learn low level C and/or hacking techniques, would it make sense to start by hacking Ms-Dos? It's easy, there is little to no protection, even for system calls, and you can do a lot with little code. Of course, there is no "practical" use, but it would be really interesting as a learning excercise. I often thought of creating a few tutorials about this, but not sure i…

There's precisely zero protection; it behaves a lot more like an embedded system. It might be nice to reuse some of the old tutorials for this, but I'm not sure if that wouldn't be too specific.

Re: A dive into the world of MS-DOS viruses (2019)

#10
post #4

“danooct1” is a great youtube channel where you can see DOS and 32x viruses in action.

Sorry - ‘32x’ viruses? As in like - SEGA 32x? That’s a bizarre platform to learn to exploit...

I assume they meant 32 bit - I.e, Windows 95 viruses and such.
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