Peter Ferrie
Virus Bulletin, Jul 2006, pp. 4-8
ISSN 0956-9979
July 2006
Download PDF (67.31Kb) (You need to be registered on forum)It seems that we have reached the stage where a parasitic virus has become a novelty. That might explain why the W32/Polip virus caught us by surprise recently - we didn't expect to see one, and we certainly didn't expect to see anything of such apparent complexity. However, looks can be deceiving.
The virus author chose the name `Polipos', which is the Spanish word for polyp, a non-malignant growth. Perhaps the virus author wanted to suggest that the virus was harmless.
While the virus certainly was written carefully, its author was not careful enough. The virus author favoured function over form, so the code is far from optimised, but it works well enough.