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The Bulgarian and Soviet Virus Factories

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The Bulgarian and Soviet Virus Factories Vesselin Bontchev Director Lab oratory of Computer Virology Bulgarian Academy of Sciences Soa Bulgaria It is now well known that Bulgaria is leader in computer virus pro duction and the USSR is following closely This pap er tries to answer the main questions Who makes viruses there What viruses are made and Why this is done It also underlines the impact of this pro cess on the West as well as on the national software industry How the story b egan Just three years ago there were no computer viruses in Bulgaria After all these were things that can happ en only in the capitalist countries They were rst mentioned in the April issue of the Bulgarian computer magazine Komputar za vas Computer for you KV in a pap er translated from the German magazine Chip Chip So on after that the same Bulgarian magazine published an article KV explaining why computer viruses cannot b e dangerous The arguments presented were in general correct but the author had completely missed the fact that the ma jority of PC users are not exp erienced programmers A few months later in the fall of the same year two men came in the editors oce of the magazine and claimed that they have found a computer virus Careful examination showed that it was the Vienna virus At that time the computer virus was a completely new idea for us To make a computer program whose p erformance resembles a live b eing is able to replicate and to move from computer to computer even against the will of the user seemed extremely exciting The fact that it can b e done and that even it had b een done spread in our country like wildre So on hackers obtained a copy of the virus and b egan to hack it It was noticed that the program contains no black magic and that it was even quite sloppily written So on new homemade and improved versions app eared Some of them were pro duced just by assembling the disassembly of the virus using a b etter optimizing assembler Some were optimized by hand As a result now there are several versions of this virus that were created in Bulgaria versions with infective lengths of and even bytes The virus has b een made almost two times shorter its original infective length is bytes without any loss of functionality This virus was the rst case So on after that we were visited by the Cascade and the Ping Pong viruses The later was the rst b o otsector virus and proved that this sp ecial area present on every diskette can b e used as a virus carrier to o All these three viruses were probably imp orted with illegal copies of pirated programs Who What Why The rst Bulgarian virus At that time b oth known viruses that infected les Vienna and Cascade infected only COM les This made me b elieve that the infection of EXE les was much more dicult Unfortunately I made the mistake by telling my opinion to a friend of mine Lets call him 1 VB for privacy reasons The challenge was taken immediately and so on after that I received a simple virus that was able to infect only EXE les It is now known to the world under the name of Old Yankee The reason for this is that when the virus infects a new le it plays the Yankee Do o dle melo dy The virus itself was quite trivial Its only feature was its ability to infect EXE les The author of this virus even distributed its source co de or more exactly the source co de of the program that releases it Nevertheless the virus did not spread very widely and even had not b een mo died a lot Only a few sites rep orted to b e infected by it Probably the reason for this was the fact that the virus was nonresident and that it infected les only on the current drive So the only p ossibility to get infected by it was to copy an infected le from one computer to another When the puzzle of creating a virus which is able to infect EXE les was solved VB lost his interest in this eld and didnt write any other viruses As far as I know he currently works in realtime signal pro cessing The TP case The second Bulgarian viruswriter TP caused much more trouble When he rst heard the idea ab out a selfreplicating program he was very interested decided to write his own virus and he succeeded Then he tried to implement a virus protection scheme and succeeded again The next move was to improve his virus to bypass his own virus protection then to improve the virus protection and so on That is why there are currently ab out dierent versions of his viruses Unfortunately several of them ab out a dozen were quite successful They spread worldwide There are rep orts ab out them from all countries of the former Eastern blo ck as well as from the USA and West Europ e Earlier versions of these TP viruses are known under the name VACSINA b ecause they contain such a string In fact this is the name of the virus authors virus protection program It is implemented as a device driver with this name The virus merely tries to op en a le with this name which means Hey its me let me pass The latest versions of the virus are b est known under the name Yankee Doodle b ecause they play this tune The conditions on which the tune is played are dierent with the dierent versions of the virus for instance when the user tries to reb o ot the system or when the system timer reaches pm 1 These are the initials of his true name It will b e the same with the other virus writers that I shall mention Please note that while I have the same initials and even his full name resembles mine we are two dierent p ersons All TP viruses are strictly nondestructive Their author payed particular attention not to destroy any data For instance the virus do es not infect EXE les for which the true le length and the length of the loadable part as it is present in the EXE header are not equal As far as I know no other virus that is able to infect EXE les works this way Also the virus do es not try to bypass the resident programs that have intercepted INT h therefore it takes the risk to b e detected by most virus activities monitoring software The author of the virus obviously could circumvent it for instance it uses a clever tech nique now known as interrupt tracing to bypass all programs that have ho oked INT h The only reason for not bypassing INT h as well is that this would also bypass all disk casheing programs thus it could cause damage Of course the fact that the virus is not intentionally destructive do es not mean that it do es not cause any damage There are several rep orts of incompatibilities with other software or of panicking users that have formatted their disks or at least damage caused by time loss denial of computer services or exp enses removing the virus It is well known that there aint no such thing as a good virus The TP viruses were not spread intentionally the cause could b e called criminal neg ligence The computer used by TP to develop e his viruses was also shared by several other p eople This is common practice in Bulgaria where not everyone can have a really p ersonal computer to work with TP warned the other users that he is writing viruses but at this time computer viruses were a completely new idea so nob o dy to ok the warn ing seriously Since TP didnt b other to clean up after himself these users got of course infected Unintentionally they spread the infection further When asked ab out the reason of writing viruses TP replied that he did this in order to try several new ideas to b etter learn the op erating system and several programming tricks He is not interested in this eld any more he has stopp ed writing viruses ab out two years ago The Dark Avenger In the spring of a new virus app eared in Bulgaria It was obviously homemade and just to remove any doubts ab out it there was a string in it saying This program was written in the city of Sofia C Dark Avenger The virus was incredibly infectious when it was in memory it was sucient to copy or just to op en a le to get it infected When the user felt that there is a virus in hisher system and without b o oting from a noninfected writeprotected system diskette ran an antivirus program which wasnt aware of this new virus he usually got all hisher executable les infected The idea of infecting a le when it is op ened was new and really successful Now such viruses are called fast infectors This strategy help ed the virus to spread world wide There are rep orts from all Europ ean countries from the USA the USSR even from Thailand and Mongolia On the top of this the virus was very dangerously destructive On each th run of an infected program it overwrote a sector on a random place of the disk thus p ossibly destroying the le or directory that contained this sector The contents of the overwritten sector was the rst bytes of the virus b o dy so even after the system has b een cleaned up there were les containing a string Eddie livessomewhere in time This was causing much more damage than if the virus was just formatting the hard disk since the destruction was very unnoticable and when the user eventually discovered it his backups probably already contained corrupted data So on after that other clever viruses b egan to app ear Almost all of them were very de structive Several contained completely new ideas Now this p erson we still cannot identify him exactly is b elieved to b e the author of the following viruses Dark Avenger V two variants V two variants Diamond two variants Nomenklatura six variants Proud Evil Phoenix Anthrax Leech Dark Avenger has several times attacked some antivirus researchers p ersonally The VV viruses claim to b e written by Vesselin Bontchev and
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