[humorix] Mystery Company Hopes To Increase Malware Quality

[James Baughn <jbaughn@xxxxxxx>]

Mystery Company Hopes To Increase Malware Quality
By Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen, kamstrup@xxxxxxxxxxx
January 10, 2005

The rain poured as I wandered the docks looking for Midnight
Alley.  This was the place I was told to be at exactly
23:37, to meet H4xWarez spokesman J. Doe.

H4xWarez specializes in "various Internet related services"
according to the promotional literature I obtained from
their secret Gopher server (I promised not to reveal the
server's IP number... as if anybody remembers how to use
Gopher).  An anonymous caller had hinted that it might prove
an interesting article to investigate the newest H4xWarez
technology.

A man wearing sunglasses and a long black coat suddenly
appeared next to me. With an intense whisper he said, "Keep
moving... and don't look at me!"

Here follows a transcription of my interview with J. Doe
(not his real pseudonym):

Q: What kind of software does H4xWarez provide?

A: There is a growing demand for rock solid, portable
malware.  That's exactly what libbackdoor and the rest of
our product suite will deliver.

Q: But doesn't the Internet have enough malware as it is?

A: Yes. But it's bad, low-quality malware.  Most of it is
riddled with serious bugs, like buffer overflows and
uninitialized variables. Most of it will segfault after the
tiniest bit of stress.  In other words, it is easily
exploited by other malware. For instance, in a matter of
milliseconds, our libworm can easily take complete control
over popular malware such as mydoom, blaster and sasser. Our
product suite, with libbackdoor as our flagship, will
provide reliable malware that runs on all platforms.

Q: Tell me a bit about libbackdoor.

A: 1?

Q: No seriously...

A: Well, with libbackdoor installed it will be a piece of
cake to get external access to everything on the host,
including root/administrator rights. This way we can install
any range of products from the rest of our suite. Like
libvirus. The smart thing is that libbackdoor only accepts
H4XWarez malware ensuring that poorly written competitors
can't use libbackdoor as an access point.

Q: The name libbackdoor implies that it is a libraray,
right?  So will a user have to link his binaries against
it?  That seems awfully complicated.

A: Yes. That is a point we are addressing at this very
moment. One solution comes from an unnamed OS vendor who has
shown interest in providing libbackdoor preinstalled.
Unfortunately, their pending OS has been delayed over and
over again.

Q: What have been the major obstacles in writing solid
malware?

A: At the moment we are struggling heavily with our build
machines constantly crashing. They are using 99-100% CPU
power just running "ls" or "dir"; we are trying to figure
out why. We have also been forced to rework our code from
scratch several times because the hard drives in our servers
keep getting wiped by unknown forces. Communication between
our ha... programmers is also severely hampered by the
skazillion megabytes of junk email they receive every day.
Our libspam development team has been particularly hard hit.

Q: With all the problems you are facing, when can we expect
a stable release?

A: I am sorry but I cannot reveal that.

Q: Even off the record?

A: Especially off the record.  If you found out, I would
have no choice but to kill you.  And my technique is rather
unpleasant -- it involves the command
"dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/brain".

Q: How did this all get started?

A: Initially, we at H4xWarez wanted to produce a portable
installation of ActiveX, but as we progressed, we eyed a
bigger market. The rest is history.

Q: Thank you. I think I've got enough here.

A: No problem. Just remember, I wasn't here.  You didn't see
nothin'.


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