BEGPAN7.CVP 931103 Getting Information My ego does not extend so far that I think this is the only source of information on viral programs that you will ever need. I am only too well aware of the limitations of my material. Having reviewed most of the rest, however, I am also aware of their limitations. I perhaps overstated the case regarding the necessity for online information sources, but not by much. There are two monthly journals, Virus Bulletin and Virus News International. Both are for the very serious researcher, and academic in tone, with subscription prices in the $150 to $250 range. (My own V.I.R.U.S. Monthly and V.I.R.U.S. Weekly, unfortunately, fall into a similar price range, although concentrating more on news and gossip.) Of the two, VB has somewhat the higher reputation and promotes an annual conference which also has a good name. Be aware, though, that both publications have links to product vendors, and thus product reviews may be slightly suspect. Other vendors produce newsletters on a less ambitious scale. The ones I have seen here had very sporadic publication schedules and very little information of value, being confined to announcements of new product releases. In any case, you have to be a customer to get the mailings. You will probably want information on the various specific viral programs. This is a constant battle, given the thousands of known viral programs and variants, and the hundreds of new ones produced each month. In the MS-DOS world, the reference usually mentioned first is the "Virus Summary List" maintained by Patricia Hoffman. This is a shareware data base, which goes under the name VSUMXymm.ZIP, where ymm is the last digit of the year and a two- digit month. Thus, VSUMX309.ZIP is the file for September, 1993. VSUM is probably the most extensive list of MS-DOS viral programs, but has an unfortunate reputation for inaccuracy. A rival program, the "Virus Information Door," is suspected of being linked to virus exchange groups and is, in any case, almost unavailable apart from a direct call to the author's BBS. An alternate source of information is the good, but aging, list in "PC Viruses" by Alan Solomon (published by Springer-Verlag). An updated and more comprehensive version is contained in the documentation for "Dr. Solomon's Anti- Virus Toolkit." For Mac users, there is a hypertext virus encyclopedia which should be available on many boards. However, for any of the other microcomputer systems, or for the most accurate listings, the best source is the "Computer Virus Catalog" produced by staff associated with the Computer Antivirus Research Organization (CARO) and the Virus Test Center (VTC), and available from the ftp site at the University of Hamburg. This has had unfortunately limited distribution outside of the Internet, and is quite restricted in the number of MS-DOS samples catalogued, but is generally most reliable. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1993 BEGPAN7.CVP 931103 ============== ______________________ Vancouver ROBERTS@decus.ca | | /\ | | swiped Institute for Robert_Slade@sfu.ca | | __ | | __ | | from Research into rslade@cue.bc.ca | | \ \ / / | | Mike User p1@CyberStore.ca | | /________\ | | Church Security Canada V7K 2G6 |____|_____][_____|____| @sfu.ca