full-disclosure - Tracking a virus by logging infected machines

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite for Android: free password hash cracker in your pocket

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Message-ID: <003901c370e2$27dc1380$550ffea9@rms>
From: rms at computerbytesman.com (Richard M. Smith)
Subject: Tracking a virus by logging infected machines

Hi Jason,

   >>> Is there any way to determine who the winner is?

Not that I want to encourage virus writing, but I think it would be very
helpful to gather infection statistics if a  virus were to keep a log of
the IP addresses of all the machines it infected.  The log could be
appended to the end of the executable file of the virus.  Each copy of a
worm or virus would contain a record of one branch of the tree of
infected machines.  

To make a log easy to locate and extract, the log can start with an
easily identified string such as "VIRUS INFECTION LOG\n".  IP addresses
should be recorded in ASCII with a \n between each IP address.  

Richard