For the purposes of a video series I’m recording one of the episodes requires my computer to be infected with a virus. I’ve only ever had a virus once on my windows PC before and I’ve never ran any anti-virus protection. The reasons for this is I know what I’m doing online however when I got infected I realised that even though I know how to avoid various ways that virus can infect your computer I am unproduced against websites that have script injection and the like. So even though I think I’m playing safe I could easily stumble upon a genuine website that might have been infected.
As soon as I discovered I had something running on my system I started running anti-virus software. Anyway back to the topic at hand. How can you intentionally get your computer infected with a virus?
We’ll it’s not that easy! I googled the subject and had a few good forums pposts however most forum administrators don’t want to link their website to virus sites as Google and the other search engines will black list your site. Google does a pretty good job of protecting their search results against malware websites so I had a bit of a challenge on my hands.
I thought to myself, how do most customers we see with viruses on their system get it in the first place. It’s usually from dodgy porn websites or file sharing website. Unfortunately I tend to stay away from both types of sites as I use Usenet for all my file downloading. Then it clicked login to my favourite Usenet indexing site and fire up a search for smallish apps that can be downloaded.
Luckily for me a lot of these Usenet indexing sites tend to have moderators and users that leave comments on the file you’d like to download. If a file has a virus in it the commentors will point this out! After searching for a copy of nero I managed to find lots of comment about some copies being infected.
It was just a case of disabling my anti-virus software and downloading the infected download. Once this had been done I fired up VM (virtual machine) copy of Windows XP – transferred the virus exe file and ran it. After a few minutes of installing and I’m now the proud owner of a virtual machine infected with a fake anti-virus Trojan!
I’ve included a video of the virus running inside the virtual machine. I plan to remove the virus and show you how it is done in a later video.
Skip to two minutes into the video – as the virus had taken over the PC it was very slow at loading up!
Thanks for making me to acquire new thoughts about personal computers. I also have belief that certain of the best ways to keep your laptop computer in best condition has been a hard plastic case, or shell, that matches over the top of your computer. These kind of protective gear usually are model specific since they are made to fit perfectly on the natural covering. You can buy these directly from owner, or via third party sources if they are designed for your notebook, however only a few laptop could have a spend on the market. Just as before, thanks for your tips.
very nice web you have, Man…nice tips!