Introduction
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It's that time of the month peoples.. vlad is back in the house
once more with another issue of our most excellent zine. This
issue took a little longer to get out than usual but it's here
at last. Most of the members went on vacation to various places
around the globe so I couldn't get in touch with them for quite
some time. Although this issue is a little bare of vlad goodies,
things should be back to normal next issue.
Since the scripts for the viruses in this issue took up over
500k we decided to bundle them all up and stick them in a zip.
The zip is garbled with a password which is "I_agree" (without
the quotes ;) Plus we had enough spaces to fill up the whole
thing, but if we should be down a few articles expect to see
the scripts right back there in the mag ;).
There hasn't been that much action in and around the virus
scene of late, but I'll try and remember as much as I can.
Don't forget, if you find any grammar or spelling mistakes
in here, deal with it. Sending me email notifying me of
each individual mistake is not much fun.. well not much fun
for me to read anyways..
The group is once more six due to Quantum deciding to leave,
his reason being his laziness. I convinced him to finish
the virus he was working on so it'll be his last contribution.
According to him, he's off to do bigger and better things
but we'll see about that ;)
It seems our friend Rod Fewster has gained himself a position
of power (heh). He's now the moderator for the fidonet virus
echo. Originally Edwin Cleeton was the moderator, but he
quit then Jeff Cook took over. Now it's over to Rod, I
haven't checked out the echo in quite some time but I'm sure
Rod's making a right fuck up of things.
Vesselin Bontchev released a text file documenting the flaws
and failings of Zvi Netiv's AV program Invircible. It was
taken off Bontchev's site by the admin there and Zvi was
threatening legal action, but I haven't heard of anything
actually goin' on. Don't really care to be honest, AV
wars are becoming a little tiresome these days.
A member of the Taiwan Power Virus Organisation (TPVO)
recently decided to alter my (Black Avenger's) virus "mon
ami la pendule" and call it his own. He named it "blue
sad" and it got a feature article in a Taiwan PC magazine.
The other members of TPVO are a little peeved with Dark
Tommy for doing this, and er hopefully it won't happen
again ;)
VLAD has made it into the papers locally, getting mentioned
in an article relating to the threat of viruses to win95.
The author of the article is David Young, the same guy who
contributed to crypt 30, and the person he interviewed for his
information is Roger Thompson co-creator of Virus Buster, who
now lives in Atlanta. I'm too lazy to type out the whole article
so here are the good bits:
"He expects the number of viruses to slow down briefly as virus
writers adapt themselves to the new Windows 95 environment.
However, one Australian virus writing group, VLAD, is posting
messages on electronic bulletin boards that claim it will
have a Windows 95 virus ready when the new operating system
is launched in about two weeks."
This comment must refer to comments made in NuKEnet, which is
monitored heavily by Anti-Virus people. What we actually said
was "VLAD is working on a Win 95 virus", not that we have one
ready. We have worked out how to append code to PE executables,
change the program entry to it and return safely to the host,
but we don't know how to call the kernel functions, this is
what is holding us back. Although not many people know it,
Win32/WinNT/Win95 all use the same file format, so there is
great potential for infection.
I'm sure there have been a few more incidents around the scene
which I could document (if I could remember them), but to get
this done I decided to make a deadline and we have 50 minutes
left so I figure I'd better go fix up the rest that needs to
be done :). Forgive me for any mistakes heh. Take care ppls.
Metabolis/VLAD
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