Peter Ferrie
Virus Bulletin, November 2010, pp. 8-10
ISSN 0956-9979
November 2010
Download PDF (46.88Kb) (You need to be registered on forum)Not long ago, a new virus writer appeared, using the name ‘hh86’. Rumour had it that hh86 was female – a rarity in the virus-writing world. There was a flurry of activity from hh86 over a period of about three months, producing a handful of viruses using new techniques, and then... she was gone without a word. The model virus writer perhaps.
At first glance, I thought that her first virus (Deelae.A) was simply a copy of a virus created by the virus writer roy g biv. A slightly closer look revealed some novel size optimizations (as well as some opportunities that were missed, and some ‘optimizations’ that are the same size but slower to execute) as well as some differences in style. It’s clear that hh86 was ‘inspired’ by roy g biv’s work. In Hollywood, they’d call that ‘reimagining’.