byrd@husc7.HARVARD.EDU (John "The Squid" Byrd) (01/18/90)
I heard a story once about a floppy copying nibble hacker for some micro... The copier would ask you to insert the disk to be copied, scramble it, and then give you a stern lecture about the evils of copying copyrighted programs. The documentation for Disinfectant 1.1 for the Mac tells about a HyperCard stack called "Sexy Ladies" that systematically deletes all information from your hard drive while you looked at the naughty pictures... There is also a "fun" program for the Commodore 64 that "expands your disk capacity to double its normal size." After hemming-and-hawing for five minutes on a blank disk, you can get a directory to find that the directory has been totally filled with "APRIL FOOL" messages. Supposedly a POKE on the old Commodore PETs, done repeatedly, damaged the processor (so much for "you can't hurt the computer by typing at the keyboard") after a few hours... Also on Disinfectant 1.1 docs is mentioned an IBM-PC virus called "Israeli" that was programmed to erase disks on Israel's Independence Day ... Anyone else know of any Evil Programs? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- John Byrd ! byrd@husc7.harvard.edu ! "Uh, could you repeat the question?" Q-Link: John Byrd ! - Sid Vicious CompuServe: 74506,3612 ! -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ken@cs.rochester.edu (Ken Yap) (01/18/90)
|Anyone else know of any Evil Programs?
You only have to subscribe to comp.virus to read some less than funny
stories. :-(
Here's the obligatory war story:
When Telerays T1061s were first acquired by the department, it didn't
take a hacker long to realize that you could squirt an escape sequence
to program a function key with a string and then execute that string.
The obvious target would be a super-user's tty, of course. Fortunately
this hacker wore white and told staff, who promptly fixed write(1) and
mail(1) to filter out escapes and make the terminal mode default to no
write at login.