virii

[Wicksta]

I don't remember seeing BBCs networked... was it some dodgy old token ring type thing? I remember the Archimedes machines being networked at school a few years later though and I had some fun with the notify function!

Haha.. this is bringing back memories of writing in BBC BASIC and also LOGO... not to mention playing Granny's Garden!

Yeah we had the Archimedes at college after I left school, I've never seen a BBC Micro network personally so that's why I'm interested in how this virus worked, sounds pretty sophisticated for it's time!

 

[Selekt0r]

Cool! What did the virus do, what language was it written in, how did it propogate and what kind of network was it you were running on these BBC Micros?

Yep - it was a very early token ring network. The virus itself was written in good old 6502 Assembly Language. I'm not sure it would even qualify as a Virus by today's definition as all it did was load itself into memory, and then if any file operations were performed then it saved a copy of itself over the file which should have been saved/loaded/copied. A rather destructive little beasty really....

It was intended to be just an exercise in coding, so it was just as well that one of the other kids managed to write an 'antivirus'/detection program to clean it off the network...

Anyway, we moved on from that to hacking the admin rights to the network (which involved copying the network ROM into a 'sideways RAM' module and altering the machine ID if I remember rightly). Those were the days

 

[Mr^B]

We had a set of BBCs networked together (Econet interface), with a fileserver + Winchester HDD (20Mb I think, this was quite a large amount of storage at the time) - each student got 64k of storage space.

The network was a straight line topology with a "terminator" at the end to prevent the signal from reflecting back up the line. Easiest hack was to take the terminator out of the ethernet socket and run like hell.

 

[Digital Punk]

Rather embarrassing to admit it, but many years ago I wrote one for the BBC Micro and unleashed it on the school network. Not something I'm particularly proud of now...

Oh, so you're the one responsible for Eldorado!

 

[titchard]

am i the only person ever to think that maybe these "anti virus" firms such as norton etc, are the ones who release them in the first place ?

its got me wondering, the average nod32 update covers over 3000 viruses, and it updates every 2 weeks, i really cant see, in this day and age, what with americas anti terrorist cybercrime devisions, 3000 virii being made by script kiddies / hackers around the globe ?

Discuss.

Many of the 3000 are variants of an original release, for example you'll have 'badass.virus.A' and .B, .C etc etc as they are slightly different. the virus software will also cover other types of virus too, scripts, viruses worms etc.

And it will cover about a decade (probably more! But a decade is a round figure) of viruses, so thats about 300 hundred a year, or just under 30 new viruses, scripts and such a month, sounds totally feasible to me.

your figure of 3000 definitions covers years of internet abuse.

Rich

 

[SiriusB]

Pedants unite!

Hardly pedantic. Viruses is the correct word. Virii is a made up word invented by someone who thought it made them sound clever.

Just one of those things that grate. Made worse by everyone repeating it

 

[VIRII]

Hardly pedantic. Viruses is the correct word. Virii is a made up word invented by someone who thought it made them sound clever.

Just one of those things that grate. Made worse by everyone repeating it

Yeah!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_of_virus

 

[SiriusB]

A mod should change your screen name to VIRUSES!

 

[Tefal]

I thoguht virii was a way of refering to a single virus (cell? sheath? wtf do you call them?)

 

[SiriusB]

Newp. Virii is a made up plural of Virus.

If you read the link posted by VIRII you will see that in English there is absolutely no use of "Virii" and even in Latin there was no Virii [1: because Virus was a mass noun - like sheep/air and 2: even if it wasn't, Latin grammar rules says it wouldn't be Virii.]

 

[Mr^B]

Hardly pedantic. Viruses is the correct word. Virii is a made up word invented by someone who thought it made them sound clever.

Just one of those things that grate. Made worse by everyone repeating it

I was being sarcastic, as I was only a few seconds before you in posting the exact same message.

Maybe we shouldn't unite, it might be a bit of a mess.

 

[platypus]

The plural of virus is Viruses, NOT VIRII!

erk, beaten to it.