virus : Java Glossary

In a Nutshell

1. Boot track viruses

   infect your hard disk when you accidentally boot while an infected floppy/CD is inserted. My launder utility will kill any boot virus on a floppy, even ones that have not been written yet. My BootSave utility will restore your hard disk boot track that has been infected. However, you must inoculate your disk (make a copy of the intact boot track) by using it before you get infected.

2. Exe Viruses

   piggy back on exe files. They arrive most commonly as email attachments or on floppy. Sometimes even files you download from websites are infected. They cause no damage until you execute the corresponding file. You can do a directory list safely. You can insert an infected floppy safely (subject to my earlier warning about the sneaky boot track viruses). Norton Antivirus or the McAfee Virus Scan will check all the files on a floppy, all incoming email and all your hard disk files against a weekly updated list of known viruses. The trouble is the kids make them up by the thousands and this technique is defenseless against a brand new virus. Never execute a file that arrives by email, even if it comes from a friend. These are most often infected.

3. ActiveX Viruses

   These are the most dangerous of all because you can pick them up just browsing the Internet. Turn off ActiveX and only turn it on when dealing with a site you are absolutely sure is trustworthy. Turn off the autodownload feature as well. The CometCursor virus is the world’s first commercial virus that spreads itself by this technique. It does no harm other than make your cursor look like Nelson Mandela’s head, but it installs itself without your permission. It is very hard to kill once you are infected.

4. Worms

   Worms manage to spread without actually attaching themselves to executable files. They typically use the Swiss cheese security in Microsoft Outlook to spread themselves by sending email to everyone in the address book. This can cause a chain reaction than can shut down the mail system, even of those who have solid virus protection. Well-known people just get swamped by incoming garbage emails.

5. Benign Viruses

   A virus that just puts up some silly message but does no damage.

6. Trojan

   is a virus that just does damage, but makes no special attempt to spread itself. It may masquerade as a silly game, but will erase everything on your hard disk.

7. Java Viruses

   There are no known Java viruses, that piggyback on class or jar files, though in theory they are possible. The Applet security system makes it impossible for virus to infect your system via Java Applets you run in your browser. However, their is one called Reveton.N that exploits a hole int the Applet security. It took Oracle months to nail it.

8. MS Word

   There are some lesser viruses which can hide inside Microsoft word documents in the form of autorun macros.

DNS (Domain Name Service) Changer

Some Estonians came up with a clever idea for a virus that has infected about 50% of business machines. It inserts a fake DNS server. So when you go to your bank, it takes you instead to a fake bank site, where you give your credentials. If your DNS stops working on 2012-07-09. That is when the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) takes down servers designed to keep infected machines running.

Stuxnet

Stuxnet was a very sophisticated virus, presumably created by combined efforts of the American and Israeli governments to sabotage the Iranian nuclear fuel concentration lab. It used multiple unreported OS (Operating System) vulnerabilities, costing about $100,000 each on the black market. It worked by sabotaging the software that controlled centrifuges to make them spin so fast they damaged themselves. The assumption is USB (Universal Serial Bus) flash drives containing the software were dropped near the facility. Some idiot put one into a secure computer looking for pornographic pictures. If the Iranians had known what was coming, they could have protected themselves by putting the programming for the centrifuge controllers into ROM (Read Only Memory) which could not be tampered with using viruses. To create such a virus the authors had to know what sort of computers and operating system the Iranians were using. They also needed the operating manuals for the centrifuge controllers.

The Americans exploited detailed information of the Iranian equipment. In a similar way, the Chinese can exploit their extremely detailed knowledge of US weapons systems, since they are the ones who do so much of the manufacture.

Vocabulary

I need to learn the following vocabulary:

anti-virus

anti-malware

anti-spyware

anti-exploit

anti-ransomware

Protecting Yourself

1. Don’t open or run any email enclosures except *.gif, *.jpg, PDF (Portable Document Format), TXT, HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and JAVA.
   EXE, COM (Component Object Model), BAT (Batch), DOC and OCX (Object linking and embedding (OLE) Control extension) are the most dangerous.
2. Avoid putting floppies or USB flash drives from outside your shop into any of your machines. If you must, scan them with a virus checker first.
3. Run a nightly virus scan such as Norton Antivirus or Windows Security Essentials (free) using freshly updated virus definitions. The most dangerous and plentiful viruses the brand new ones.
4. A good virus scanner should be mulit-thread for speed, but also let you choke it down so it puts light load on your system when you are trying to use it.
5. Don’t surf the web with Internet Explorer unless you disable ActiveX first.
6. Don’t install software unless it comes from a reputable source. Avoid installing any software you don’t absolutely need.
7. Make sure your Internet connection goes through a firewall.
8. Don’t let people use any of your machines who you can’t trust to follow these rules.
9. If you become infected, get help quickly from someone who knows what to do. If you don’t know what you are doing, you can easily lose all your data and easily reinfect yourself. You must disinfect and/or protect yourself from reinfection from every single floppy, CD (Compact Disc) burned, backup tape, USB, SSD (Solid State Disk), ZIP drive…
10. Never click on a pop up that claims your computer has a virus.
11. Don’t click on links or attachments in e-mails even from people your know unless there are techo-savvy.
12. Turn on your browser’s pop-up blocking feature.
13. Never download anti-virus software from a pop-up or link sent to you in an e-mail.
14. If you’ve received a scareware message, please contact your local police office and the Canadian Anti Fraud Centre (1-888-495-8501) to report it.
15. Turn off Java Applets unless you are visiting trusted site. This is a temporary security measure that should soon be relaxed.
16. Turn off JavaScript unless you are visiting trusted site.

Free Anti-virus Software

AV (Anti-Virus) Originally there were only three free Antiviruses, but now almost every company offers a stripped down free version. Most companies now also offer a premium edition and an Internet edition (which is actually a firewall). You have to read the websites carefully to discover the differences in features and price. Consider that reviews might be talking about the super premium plus edition, where you are interviewing for the entry level one. I have a long memory for companies that good or evil. I think these three original free vendors deserve continued support:

• Microsoft Security Essentials. Free, comes with Windows. You can update it with new definitions about twice a day. The catch is, this is the most common anti-viral program and so virus writers target it first. I have never seen it compared against the competing commercial products. Real-time protection is very slow.
• Microsoft Defender. Free, comes with older versions of Windows and In Windows 10.
• Ad-Aware by Lavasoft. Comes in three versions free, per month (with firewall) and a month. It tries to install a browser-ad. Just say no and say no to accepting the user agreement and it will install anyway. The only this unusual about it is you can configure which of 16 sorts of places viruses can hide you want to scan. It is the new kid on the block. I don’t see the point in the product. We already have more than enough anti-virus scanners. We need something radically different that can deal with unidentified viruses.
• Symantec is fat and slow.
• McAfee is fat and slow
• F-prot is lean and mean and fast. It does not pester you with popups. It costs for the home version.
• 360 a free virus checker from China is so bad, it should be considered malware.
• Malware Bytes specialises in removing spyware, though they also make an anti virus products. It costs .
• Alwil Avast. The home version is free. You get it free for the first 60 days just by downloading, then you register your email address to get it free for a further 12 months at a time. This is not explained anywhere. I found out by emailing for clarification. It is comprehensive with a ridiculously complicated toggling user interface designed like a child’s Transformer toy with secret compartments. I suggest downloading one of the more adult skins which are a bit more intuitive. The company is Czech. Avast detects viruses and can sometimes repair them. It has also has a checksum scheme to detect virus infection by unknown viruses. Avast has bigger brothers. Avast is a bit braindamaged in that it scans the recycle bin for viruses finding infected files you have already deleted. I have been unsuccessful at installing it on Vista, though it worked fine on  W2K and XP. Alwil has ignored my emails.
• Microsoft Security Essentials is available free to use on Windows 7. Its updates come as part of the usual Windows 7 updates about twice a day. You control it from the green tent icon in the hidden icons on the far right of the task bar.
• Clam Antivirus and the ClamWin front end. It is run by a team of unpaid volunteers who are rather impatient with anyone who does not understand and follow their undocumented rules. Clam just finds viruses. It does not remove them. All you can do is delete infected files.
• Kaspersky online. The offline version is not free. The online version requires IE (Internet Explorer) because it is an Active-X program. It quite thorough, reporting programs with security vulnerabilities as well as actual malware. Unfortunately, it refuses to believe you when you tell it there is a false alarm. It insists on blocking you any time you run or use that program in any way. Further, it insisted on fixing what it considered my unwise use of Take Command even though I told it not to. The UN (United Nations) hired Kaspersky, a Russian company, to track down the Flame virus, a highly sophisticated virus used for international espionage. Kaspersky is big and slow. The US government has banned the use of Kaspersky software by government agencies. They have close ties to Putin, Russian spy agencies and the Trump-Russian election fixing scandal.
• BitDefender has a free version and several pay versions. The free version has nothing to configure, not even the drives or when to run scans or when to update definitions. It continuously scans in the background when the machine is idle. It can detect unknown viruses. It monitors suspect programs in a sandbox to see if they misbehave. It seeks out rootkit viruses. It searches out malware in HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) you download. This is quite impressive for a free program. Make sure you ask it to do an initial scan as part of the install or it will presume all is perfect to start. You must register so that they can send you ads for the pay products. I had to get rid of it because it kept interfering with the Excelsior Jet install. Even when I told it to exclude JetSetup.exe from blocking, when the file appeared again during the install, it treated it as if it were a totally new file.

Microsoft has Defender bundled with Vista, W2008, W7-32, W7-64, W8-32, W8-64, W2012, W10-32 and W10-64. It is automatically and frequently updated. I don’t know why it is not considered a proper anti-virus program.

Microsoft plans to release a free virus checker code named Morro. Perhaps it will just be Defender ported to the older operating systems. This should save MS money on phone support. Much the way vaccination works, it should greatly reduce incidence the of viruses by removing sources of infection.

Configuring

Rant

The current way of stopping viruses is incompetent. Its purpose is to force customers to keep paying over and over for virus protection. It works analogously to an airport security system that checks the id of every incoming person and looks it up in a databank of known terrorists. There are no inspections, no profiling, no X-rays. There are no restrictions on terrorists getting into sensitive areas. Further, if a known terrorist wears a disguise they can past the gate too. The way terrorists get into the database is to be caught red-handed causing damage, then their twins or clones are also excluded. The lists are broadcast to other airports. The terrorist organisations can easily defeat the system by sending new agents or old agents in disguise.

Futures

What could be do that would effectively stop viruses in their tracks?

The current way of stopping viruses is stupid. It requires identifying every possible virus, then looking specifically for each one. This is like shutting the barn door after the horse has fled. Further, the brats can invent new viruses faster than they can be found and identified. It is only a matter of time until someone uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to manufacture millions of new viruses a day, which will overwhelm all the attempts at cataloging them. Virus companies persist in this inept strategy because it locks in customers who need a new version of the software daily. The torrent of new viruses means small companies cannot compete.

Viruses could be stopped in their tracks, including future viruses, simply by enforcing a rule that all executables, including OS modules, be digitally signed by their authors, the same way the Java Applets are. Then a virus can be detected simply by verifying the digital signature. It is all but impossible for a virus to cook up a valid digital signature for an executable it has modified. If vendors posted the originals, digitally signed, then any contaminated modules could be automatically restored without human intervention. This would not stop Trojans, but it does identify who created them, making prosecution and civil legal action easy. The problem is half-assed anti-viral utilities that require constant updates are big business. They don’t want a solution that works once and for all.

One interim solution would be to have disk partitions or SSDs (Solid State Disks) that were read-only. You would put your executables and DLLs (Dynamic Link Libraries) there, (or rather installs would.) Access would be by password, good only for one install instance. They would all have digital signatures, or at least digests, that would be checked on copying in. This would make it very difficult for a virus to modify an executable. The problem is, it would require all vendors to digitally sign executables and use the API (Application Programming Interface) to install executables and other files on different drives. The most important vendor to comply would be Microsoft, who currently puts all its data and executables on C:

You could institute a rule that an executable could only be updated by an install program digitally signed by the same author. By default, files could not be updated except by a program digitally signed by the same author as the program that created it. Programs would have to explicitly export files before programs written by other authors could modify them.

The Catch

PC (Personal Computer) Pitstop PC Matic aka Supershield stops every unknown executable, whether it carries a known virus or not. This is great for catching new unknown viruses, but has two serious problems:

1. If you use unusual software, the sort that businesses use, rather than individuals and home offices, those executables will not be on the white list and they will be stopped.
2. If you are a program developer, you may be creating hundreds of new executables, or variants on old executables in a day. Supershield will stop them all. There is no mechanism to automatically mark them as safe as part of the build process.