Hacker Chronicles 2 (Alt)/The_Hacker_Chronicles_Volume_II-CD2.iso/virusl2/virusl2.222

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VIRUS-L Digest   Wednesday, 25 Oct 1989    Volume 2 : Issue 222

VIRUS-L is a moderated, digested mail forum for discussing computer
virus issues; comp.virus is a non-digested Usenet counterpart.
Discussions are not limited to any one hardware/software platform -
diversity is welcomed.  Contributions should be relevant, concise,
polite, etc., and sent to [e-mail] (that's
LEHIIBM1.BITNET for BITNET folks).  Information on accessing
anti-virus, document, and back-issue archives is distributed
periodically on the list.  Administrative mail (comments, suggestions,
and so forth) should be sent to me at: [e-mail].
 - Ken van Wyk

Today's Topics:

VIRUSCAN/VIRSCAN Issues (PC)
Free Catalog Disk Infected (PC)
Protecting Your User's Disks (Mac)
New virus in Israel (PC)
You're not alone; DataCrime infection report (PC)
possible virus infection (PC)
Re: 0 bytes in 1 hidden file, virus? (PC)
The not-so-new virus (Mac)
Re: VIRUSCAN test (IBM PC)
Jerusalem Virus Version B detected (PC)

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Date:    Tue, 24 Oct 89 11:12:03 -0700
From:    portal!cup.portal.com![e-mail]
Subject: VIRUSCAN/VIRSCAN Issues (PC)

The following is a forwarded message from John McAfee:

=============================================================================

    A number of people have commented on the "closed" architecture of
VIRUSCAN and the encryption of the individual search strings used for
virus identification.  Some users feel that this is done in order to
maintain a "monopoly" in the scanning industry and to keep competitors
from using the same strings.  I would like to put that concern to
rest, if possible.  First, as many users will have noticed, the
earlier versions of SCAN had all strings available for anyone who
cared to look at them.  The users who wished merely to scan for
viruses merely noticed them, shrugged (really - what value is it to
the average user?), and went on.  The folks who seemed to take notice
of the strings were those few crackers who used the strings to change
the virus segments referenced by the strings.  This has happened seven
times in three months, the most recent being the New Jerusalem virus
discovered by Jan Terpstra and Ernst Baedecker in the Netherlands.
The virus is identical to the Jerusalem-B, with the exception of the
string changes that SCAN originally referenced.  What this does is
invalidate all of the work done to date on identification of the
Jerusalem-B.  To make it more difficult for crackers to get around the
scanning process, I've done two things: 1. encrypt the strings (I know
that this merely slows down the determined cracker, but it does deter
the casual cracker - of which there are many). and 2. I use multiple
strings for the more mutable viruses.  In addition, I have taken to
randomly changing strings for different versions of scan.  None of
this was done to deter competition.  In fact, as Art Gilbert and Bill
Vance at IBM should agree, I co-operate fully with competitors in
providing virus samples, infection trends, market information and
(possibly unwelcome) suggestions for improvements and points to watch
out for in the more troublesome viruses.  I even provide my string
lists to any legitimate competitor who asks for them.  I just don't
provide them to the public, and I'm not sure the public really would
be served by knowing the binary string sequences I use to identify a
given virus.
    I response to the comments that IBM's open string list will make
it easier for users to update the files themselves - I absolutely
agree.  There's a lot to be said for the flexibility and control that
such an approach brings.  But, ignoring the problem crackers for the
moment, we will have to ask - who is going to update the string files?
Is it each user?  If so then chaos will ensue.  I can categorically
say that the average user is incapable of taking a live virus sample
and creating a valid search string for that virus.  The problems are
immense.  First, many viruses are written in C, PASCAL or other higher
level language.  Unless you are familiar with the actual code
generated by the compiler runtime library and the canned compiler
output sequences, you will have dificulty separating the origin virus
code from the same code that you will find in hundreds or maybe
thousands of other similarly compiled programs.  Second, the string
segments must have a unique "style" that will avoid false alarms with
similar styled programs.  For example, choosing a long string of
register saves as an identifier will guarantee false alarms with other
programs.  The user will also have to know something about the
infective characteristics of the virus as well.  Does it only infect
the partition record, or the boot sector?  Does it infect overly
files?  Which ones? etc.  All in all it is a task that most user
shouldn't have to face.  So we can agree, I think, that the strings
will havee to be done by competent programmers with a fair amount of
virus experience if it is to work.  The question then is - which
programmers?  Who will set the standard.  If there is no standard,
then again, chaos results and which version of the strings swhould we
use?  My feeling is that the IBM approach works well for researchers,
but that the general public should use only the strings that IBM
produces (or someone that IBM should designate).  So much for my
soap-box for the day.
    We survived the earthquake out here.  We were 6 miles from the
epicenter, but we must have been on a standing wave since we suffered
only moderate damage.  My cat slept through the entire event (though,
admittedly, he only normally wakes for 15 minutes at breakfast and 20
minutes at dinnertime).
    Have a good day.

John McAfee

------------------------------

Date:    Mon, 23 Oct 89 19:21:00 -0500
From:    IA96000 <[e-mail]>
Subject: Free Catalog Disk Infected (PC)

  My friend just received, and I now have in my posession a free
disk from a Shareware copying company, which he received after
he sent in a "bingo" card from a popular computer magazine.

  The disk has three infected files on it:

  1) GETKEY.COM  3074 bytes  01-01-80  12:35a
  2) CL.COM      3457 bytes  08-01-86  02:39p
  3) LIST.COM    7871 bytes  06-17-86  02:37p

  SCAN version 0.7V42 reports as follows:

  GETKEY.COM - 3066/2930 TRACEBACK VIRUS
      CL.COM - 3066/2930 TRACEBACK VIRUS
    LIST.COM - FU MANCHU VERSION A

GETKEY.COM and CL.COM are in the disks ROOT directory. CL.COM
appears to a hidden file, as it is not seen when you do a DIR from
the DOS prompt. LIST.COM is in the subdirectory \ORD.

To be fair to the company which sent the disk, I will mention their
name here, as in all probability, they do not know the disk is
infected. No sense creating another major problem...

The disk label is designed as follows:

                       1989 COMPANY NAME CATALOG
                      ***************************
                     P.O. xxxx HESPERIA, CA 92345
               MAY VIEW OR PRINT CATALOG & ORDERFORM
                     TO START CATALOG . . . A>START

The disk has one subdirectory on it named \ORD which contains 8 files.
The ROOT directory contains 25 files.

My friend spotted the fact that LIST.COM is in both the ROOT and the
sub-directory and the file sizes differ. Also, since he did not know
the company, he ran SCAN as a precaution.

If Dave Chess at IBM or Mr. McAfee wants a copy of this disk, please
let me know...by EMAIL. I have gone to great lengths to not identify the
company to avoid any problems.

Also..please note this disk WAS NOT sent to the university, nor was any
damage done to any of the university equipment.

I hope I have given you all enough information to identify the disk,
if you happen to receive one. The disk was not unsolicited, in other
words, the disk was requested by my friend and the magazine has nothing
to do with this issue, at this point in time.

------------------------------

Date:    Tue, 24 Oct 89 15:32:00 -0500
From:    "Thomas R. Blake" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Protecting Your User's Disks (Mac)

>(Prior to INIT29,  I had been advising my users that if they go
>to Kinko's they would be safe if they took only their data diskette.
>But if a data infection  can spread to their application disks,
>this would not be good advice.)
>
>Anyone got the REAL answer?

Well, I assume they're going to Kinko's to print.  (Yes/No?)  I'd say
if they write-protect their diskettes they have no need to worry.

Macintosh viruses will not spread to write-protected diskettes.

                                                Thomas R. Blake
                                                SUNY-Binghamton

------------------------------

Date:    Tue, 24 Oct 89 19:32:37 +0200
From:    "Yuval Tal (972)-8-474592" <[e-mail]>
Subject: New virus in Israel (PC)

A new virus was found here in Israel. I didn't know whether to call
it: The Do Nothing Virus or The Stupid Virus.

The author (which is as usually known) put an infected program on one
of the BBSs in Israel. The program was an infected program which my
friend wrote BUT it claimed to be a new version (eg. my friend's
latest version was 3.4 and the one on the BBS was 4.0). He quickly
downloaded this file and he found out that it is infected with a
virus. After checking this virus he and I got to one big conclusion.
The author of this virus probably doesn't know assembly so good. You
can see this quite clear:
   -The virus tries to push only one byte into the stack.
   -The virus is copied always to location 9800:100h this means that it will
    work only on computers 640KB. The virus doesn't reduce the amount of
    memory (like other viruses such as Denzuk, Ping-Pong etc'). The virus is
    copied and that's it! Turbo Pascal, for instance, may use this location
    as heap and the virus may be erased from memory.
Another thing, this virus infects only the first .COM file on the
directory.  It doesn't check if the file is already infected or not,
it just infects it.  This virus does nothing besides infecting the
file, no damage at all! This is why I called it The Do Nothing Virus.

Here is a report I made. I may change it a bit here and there..

- --------------------------------------------------------------------------
Entry................: The Do Nothing Virus
Alias(es)............: The Stupid Virus
Virus detection when.: 22-October-1989
               where.: Israel
Classifications......:.COM file infecting virus/extending.
Length of virus......: 583 bytes add to file.
Operating system(s)..: MS-DOS
Version/release......: 2.0 or higher
Computer model(s)....: IBM PC,XT,AT and compatibles
Identification.......: .COM files: The first 3 bytes of the infected files
                       are changed.
                       System: The virus copies itself to 9800h:100h.
Type of infection....: Extends .COM files. Adds 583 bytes to the end of
                       the file. The virus copies itself to 9800:100h. This
                       means that only computers with 640KB may be infected,
                       hooks int 21 and infects other programs by scanning the
                       directory until it finds a .COM file. It is infected
                       upon function Fh and 3Dh. .EXE files are not infected.
Infection trigger....: The first .COM file of the current directory is
                       infected whether the file is infected or not.
Interrupts hooked....: Int 21
Damage...............: None.
Damage trigger.......: Whenever a file is opened.
Standard means.......: Lots of programs such as Turbo Pascal use this area
                       And the virus may be erased...
Acknowledgment:
Location.............: The Weizmann Institute Of Science, Rehovot, Israel
Documented by........: Yuval Tal ([e-mail]).
Date.................: 25-October-1989
-
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

- -Yvual Tal

------------------------------

Date:    Tue, 24 Oct 89 17:45:48 -0400
From:    Arthur Gutowski <[e-mail]>
Subject: You're not alone; DataCrime infection report (PC)

>From Virus-L Digest v2.220, frisk writes:

> Well - now I know of one victim of the Datacrime-II virus .....
> myself. :-(

Well, you shouldn't feel alone.  A friend of mine who works for
ERIM (Environmental Research Institute of Michigan) got hit too.
His quotes sounded something like this (before being hit):

    "Oh, I'm not worried, I don't do much software trading,
     and what I do is straight from BBSs and buying from vendors."

That was until he turned on a computer at work on Saturday 10/14.
He had recently DLed a copy of PKZ102.EXE (PKZIP v1.02, self-extracting)
from CompuServe and decided to try it out.  Although I can't be sure
that this was the source of the infection, eh told me it was the first
time he had had a chance to run the program (hence, strong implication).

Then it was showtime.  Bye bye hard drive, low level format (F6) to
cylinder 0.  Effectively wiped out all access to the hard drive.
Even a large chunk of the 2d copy of the FAT was duly destroyed because
of this.  He admitted to me that rebuilding a FAT, even with Mr. Norton's
help, is not much fun.

Needless to say, he has grudgingly accepted from me a disk containing
several acrhives of antiviral tools to help him along in the battle.
This disk is soon to be out in our Consulting center and student labs.
Hopefully we can make enough people aware of things like this before
more have to pay the awful price.  Thankfully, it's already happening...

One final note, I'm not POSITIVE it was DC that hit him, it may have
been some variant.  He is currently trying to see if he can get the
infected program to me so I can look at it using info I've gained
from watching here.  Two strane things that made me question my
assumption:
         1)  No "DATACRIME" message was thrown up on the screen
             that he remembers;
         2)  A name, Siegmar Schmidt, was written to the partition
             record.
Now again, it DID format cyl0 and only cyl0...can anyone say for sure?
Please e-mail me to the bitnet address above, 'twould be much appreciated.

It CAN happen to anyone!

Art

+------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Arthur J. Gutowski, Student Assistant                            |
| Antiviral Group / Tech Support / WSU University Computing Center |
| 5925 Woodward; Detroit MI  48202; PH#: [phone]            |
| Bitnet: AGUTOWS@WAYNEST1   Internet: [e-mail]     |
+==================================================================+
| "OOPS, what OOPS?!?...No, I diSTINCTly heard you say 'OOPS'!"    |
+------------------------------------------------------------------+

------------------------------

Date:    Tue, 24 Oct 89 19:34:21 -0400
From:    [e-mail] (Dennis Flanders)
Subject: possible virus infection (PC)

I am a new user on VIRUS-L.  I am a communication engineer on the
FTS2000 project at Boeing Computer Services and we run a large
client/server data network.  It now serves over 800 PC's, Sun
Workstations and is served by several host machines from mainframes to
micros.  I said all that to say this:

In the process of "de lousing" our network for Columbus day and Friday
the 13th, using a program called VScan, we discovered seven programs
that showed as possible infected programs or carrier programs.  In
disassembling them only one proved to be dangerous.  The others
contained code sequences to totally lock the keyboard and triggered
warnings.  It may have had the infection passed on by another virus as
the first three bytes in the .com file were 909090h. The following
bytes (I believe 19) simply blitzed track 0.

The infected file was a brief program (217 bytes) called KEYLOCK.COM
which comes with a set of utilities distributed by PC Magazine.  We
could find no infected distribution disks.  Only versions found on two
PCs were found to contain this bomb.

Curiously enough a couple of programs (ie NORTON.COM) popped a warning
due to 1Fh found in the Seconds field of the directory.  We also found
several programs with a value >60 (ie 62) in the same location.  All
but one turned out to be harmless, we are still looking at the one.

+-------------------------------------------------+----------------------+
|Dennis M. Flanders                               |                      |
|AT&T Mail:  !DFLANDERS                           | If at first you      |
|MCI Mail:   DFLANDERS                            |   don't succeed get  |
|INTERNET:   [e-mail]                  |     a bigger hammer! |
|CompuServe: 73507,1771                           |                      |
+-------------------------------------------------+----------------------+

------------------------------

Date:    Tue, 24 Oct 89 14:56:02 -0400
From:    [e-mail] (Robert Snyder)
Subject: Re: 0 bytes in 1 hidden file, virus? (PC)

In volume 2 issue 217 of the virus list, Tasos notes that CHKDSK
report "0 bytes in 1 hidden files" and wonders if he has a virus.
This seems to come up fairly often when new people join the list so
maybe an automatic answer is needed.  In any case, Tasos probably ran
CHKDSK on a disk with a volume label as that will exhibit his
symptoms.  I.e. it's not likely that Tasos has a virus.

    Robert Snyder
    {att|clyde}!moss!rjs
    [e-mail]
    [phone]

The above statements are my own thoughts and observations and are not
intended to represent my employer's position on the subject(s).

------------------------------

Date:    25 Oct 89 03:02:34 +0000
From:    [e-mail] (The Mad Mathematician)
Subject: The not-so-new virus (Mac)

I am the one who first posted about the possibly new virus.  I will
give all the information I have here.  I believe I hae finally gotten
some infected software.

There was a great deal of confusion at first as what exactly was
happening.  I was a consultant once, and as such am called upon to
assist the present consultants with tasks they are new at.  We had
been having a problem with disks crashing at an alarming rate, all
showing identical symptoms.  They are these:

The Chooser becomes unable to find any printer resources.
The System and most system software gets writeen to, in an as yet
unknown manner.  Their sizes may or may not change.
Other applications are written to, and documents created with them
become unreadable.
The Desktop gets damaged, causing the message "This disk needs minor
repairs.  Do you want to fix it?" to come up on bootup.  By this stage
the only recourse is to copy documents off with something like Deskzap
and reformat the disk, replacing all the software.
If the disk is repaired, it actually may seem that way, but ususally
is ruined, even to the point of unusability.

No virus detection programs identify a virus, except perhaps SAM Anti
Virus Clinic, and even that doesn't always work.  It _may_ be a
NVIR variant that is self-modifying, but it does not create the
nVIR resource.  It does go through Vaccine, but Gatekeeper stops
it cold.

The reported STR 801 resource was an error by me.  Please ignore this.

There appeared to be a second virus also running around for a while.
The sysmptoms were:
Macwrite had its name changed to Macwite or Macwight.
The ICN resource for the application was changed to show Macwite instead
of the parallel lines.
That's all we could find.  We have found no other examples since the first
three or four disks.  I am of the opinion that someone modified one copy
using something like Resedit, then shared it.

That is all the information I can recall at this time.  As I said, I
believe I have found an infected disk, and will be sending copies of
an infected application at the earliest opportunity, hopefully
tommorrow.  Thank you for your patience.

Joseph Poutre (The Mad Mathematician)
[e-mail]
Understand the power of a single action.  (R.E.M.)

------------------------------

Date:    Tue, 24 Oct 89 23:28:15 -0400
From:    [e-mail] (David Gursky)
Subject: Re: VIRUSCAN test (IBM PC)

In VIRUS-L Digest V2 #221, Charles Preston wrote a rather long message
about virus scanners vs. more automated virus detection applications.
I would like to point out to him that although there are some
excellent scanning applications on the market, for Macs, PCs, etc., I
prefer recommending that users do not rely on scanners simply because
you must remember to periodically scan the disk.  My experience has
been that users simple do not remember to do this, hence a strategy
that relied solely on a scanner application would not be a strong
defense against electronic vandalism.

David Gursky
Member of the Technical Staff
Special Projects Department, W-143
The MITRE Corporation

------------------------------

Date:    Tue, 24 Oct 89 23:48:11 -0500
From:    [e-mail]
Subject: Jerusalem Virus Version B detected (PC)

After running Scan 1.1V45 on my hard drive I detected the Jerusalem Virus
Version B on one of my files.  The file that I detected the virus on had
not appeared in earlier runs of Scan.

The infected file is UNVIRUS.EXE.  The archive I got it out of was
UNVIRUS.ARC.  I downloaded this file from the SIMTEL20 PD archives.  I
immediately deleted the file.  I have never had a reason to the
program (and I would think that running the program on itself would
have adverse affects).

[Ed. Could someone at SIMTEL20 please check into this and confirm or
deny it?  Thanks!]

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| [e-mail]  | Sean A. Haynes |Student Northeastern |
| [e-mail]        | 46 Udine St.   |University, Boston   |
| [e-mail]               | Arlington, MA  |MA 02115             |
|                                      | [phone] |[phone]       |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

-----------------------------

End of VIRUS-L Digest
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