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> It appears to be a joke or prank, simply because this particular virus does nothing more than periodically show "YOUR COMPUTER HAS BEEN STONED" on one out of every eight computer boot-ups, and is over 25 years old.
When viruses were mainly jokes...
I seem to remember just having some text copy+pasted into IRC channels used to send peoples anti virus software into meltdown.. but this was sometime like 2000-2001
For a while, some security suites would freak out and terminate an IRC connection if they saw the text "start keylogger" show up. You could get people to drop by saying it in a channel, for instance.
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Those are probably 'full nodes' to participate in the network as a miner or casual user you don't need to run a full node.
Yeah, but if there are just 8,000 nodes, suddenly it seems like it wouldn't be all that hard to hijack the network. It's possible I misunderstand, and overestimate the value of full nodes.
I seem to remember just having some text copy+pasted into IRC channels used to send peoples anti virus software into meltdown.. but this was sometime like 2000-2001
If I remember correctly, it used to be the case that if you could get the string +++ATH0 transmitted to somebody in the clear, you could hang up their dialup connection because it was a control code for Hayes modems that ended up being standardised on. Badly written firmware in modems meant that this was often interpreted even when it wasn't transmitted in a control code context.
Bad firmwares would also accept same from remote side, although supposedly it should only have come from the local side.
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Yeah, but if there are just 8,000 nodes, suddenly it seems like it wouldn't be all that hard to hijack the network. It's possible I misunderstand, and overestimate the value of full nodes.
You're basically right though, there are regular calls on /r/bitcoin for people to run a full node because the number has gone down recently. I decided set one up on my dedicated host due to one of these.
Anyway - what does being a full node entail?
So a joker decided to embed some Anti Virus bait in the blockchain, just a few bytes is enough to make the software go nuts deleting a whole lot of files the Bitcoin client needs. The solution the Bitcoin developers suggest is pure old-school malware style, XOR the blocks to hide it from the Anti Virus suites. Classic. https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/issues/4069
it won't solve the problem, the joker can simply inject a string that becomes a virus signature after XOR.
I seem to remember just having some text copy+pasted into IRC channels used to send peoples anti virus software into meltdown.. but this was sometime like 2000-2001
DCC SEND LOLLERCOPTER There were a few others, but that's the one i remember. the part after DCC SEND doesn't matter as long as it was longer than 8 characters i think it was.
IIRC it still bites a couple of people on Freenode, but the most networks have auto-kick bots in place for these scriptkiddies.
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Yeah, but if there are just 8,000 nodes, suddenly it seems like it wouldn't be all that hard to hijack the network. It's possible I misunderstand, and overestimate the value of full nodes.
Non-mining nodes just hold and relay validated blocks, they don't do anything that can be hijacked.
OR they could have just used the string from EICAR test file [1]. Since I don't use bitcoin, let me ask, does everyone have to download the whole blockchain to their computer in order to mine or receive/sent the coins? Wouldn't the blockchain be in XX GB size by now? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EICAR_test_file
OR they could have just used the string from EICAR test file [1]. Since I don't use bitcoin, let me ask, does everyone have to download the whole blockchain to their computer in order to mine or receive/sent the coins? Wouldn't the blockchain be in XX GB size by now? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EICAR_test_file
The string from the EICAR test file has been in the current testnet chain since the start in order to try to spot these issues before they bothered users. Unfortunately, it appears that AV software completely ignores files larger than 32 MBytes, so it won't notice them in the blockchain— just the chainstate. And so the grand idea of putting the triggers in coinbases didn't work there. The other fun thing is that the…