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Data crawling viruses
by Acidus at 1:49 pm EDT, Aug 30, 2004

] In brief A computer virus specifically designed to steal
] files with names such as "exam" or "test questions" has
] reportedly been discovered by a Chinese Internet security
] firm.
]
] The "exam theft" virus is capable of infecting Microsoft
] Word and Excel files and uploading targeted documents
] onto the Net, the Shanghai Daily News reports. The paper
] reports that there is a thriving trade in black-market
] exam papers and implies this might have motivated the
] creation of the virus.

This is amazing! We have spiders and robots to crawl and compile searchs for the web. Dogpile used to (and probably still does) have a search for major FTP sites. We have some (rather crappy but getting better) P2P search engines. Viruses that are tailor made to crawl the internet looking for specific data instead of destroying it was bound to happen. Provided you could keep the propogation controlled, people might not even know about it.

Imagine a virus that exploits a box, searchs for specific data, send it to you, patch the hole the came in with, and moves to the next computer.

RE: Data crawling viruses
by E2 at 7:52 pm EDT, Aug 31, 2004

Acidus wrote:
{snip}

] Imagine a virus that exploits a box, searchs for specific
] data, send it to you, patch the hole the came in with, and
] moves to the next computer.

Or, rather than patching the hole, remains dormant waiting for a new search string

... or, better yet, don't patch, but leave a flag indicating what search strings have been searched for on what dates, then remove itself (avoids re-infection and minimizes run time and bandwith use == less likely to catch attention from AV firms)

The problem then becomes where to distribute the harvested info to and from the distribution center unnoticed.

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