Viridium.ro

They say the older you get, the harder it becomes to make friends, however, the longer and more robust the friendships are. Fact or fiction? (what was that line on the E! TV channel?) Hence high school is better than elementary school, college is better than high school, and so on. I don’t know. I preferred high school in several respects. First, it was my contact with the cultural city. The first contact with those people I always felt different from, inferior. (no, I’m not inferior to them) It was where I first proved I can achieve respect from the others, that I’m bright and strong. It was where I made some best friends, with whom I only recently parted ways. But what am I talking about here? This article is about something else. Highschool is when I first heard about computer viruses. For a brief moment, in that hostel room, when they talked about it, I thought that computers may contain viruses that can infect people, the very kind that we’d heard about in biology class! Then I think it was Radu Telcean (nice guy from my neighbourhood) who cleared it up for us weenies. The thought of the concept and the immense potential it suggested were mesmerizing. I immediately showed interest towards the subject, but those weren’t the days to google around and find what you need. Those were the Intel 80×386 days, the days when MS-DOS was ruling the earth. IPX/SPX LAN, AUTOEXEC.BAT, COMMAND.COM, (which has to be fifty something KB in size), TURBO.EXE, Norton Commander. Oh boy, those were the days. But it was around when Cristi Nedelescu (some sort of a guru back then, a student who had been at the Olympics) obtained the “Iliescu” virus and that’s about when I became more acquainted to the subject. I had an MS-DOS book that talked about the structure of the OS, about the 64K upper limit on the available RAM, about the Interrupt Vector table, device drivers, boot record, and a lot of assembler language. It all fell into place. There were COM programs, EXE, headers, registers, memory resident programs, and what not.Then there were memory resident programs, hooking interrupts, boot sector viruses.Then there was Frederick Cohen, the guy who coined the term in a seminal paper. One of his books placed viruses in a nice framework and focused on security in computing. I learned the formal definition of a virus (boring, using the Turing Machine as starting point), the three main parts of a computer virus, then I learned about various kinds of attacks, (companion viruses, parasitic infectors, viruses which compress themselves, memory resident viruses which could lie to you about the state of the system) integrity tools, vaccines, taking snapshots, issues with inherently unsafe environments such as that provided by MS-DOS and more.I wrote some assembler language viruses but was never obsessed with payload. To a smart guy like me, imagining grotesque ways of annoying your usual weenie was nothing but a boring exercise. Writing the virus is all about the art of making it spread.It was in 11th grade, I think, that I wrote an article about creating a virus in Turbo Pascal. Source code included. The concept of finding hosts, overwriting some of the host and saving the overwritten information somewhere so that the host can be reconstructed was still present.But this time the concept was so simple that coding it in a high level programming language was a breeze! It was so powerful that it had the potential to put your novice programmer in the position to write powerful viruses. It also had some nice properties, but let’s head to the next article for the details.