Is there such a good thing as a good virus.

Is Nachi going to spark off a new type of virus?

[chris_f]

Hi all,

Nachi is reinfecting my work at the minute. I have read up on it's actions and it seems to be a Blaster and MyDoom anti-virus virus.

It infects machines not patched against the viruses. Removes any infections, if found. Then, forces the download of microsoft patches that protect against the vulnerability.

This has lead a colleague to create an internal virus. It has safe guards that causes the virus to delete itself if it is on a machine that is not on our network. It scans and removes all the big (in terms of news coverage) viruses since Nimda and forces windows update to run.

Both these instances lead me to ask the question, is there a good virus. Nachi is a problem because it uses a lot of the system reasources that slowly causes the systems to grind to a halt. My colleagues virus only runs while the screen saver is active (the computers are left on over night with the exception of weekends).

I was wondering what other people thought.

Chris

[trillianjedi]

I haven't read about this one, but a virus is an app. that has the ability to reproduce itself and install itself on other machines without user input.

Is that what it's doing?

TJ

[chris_f]

In short. Yep.

[too much information]

*reminds me of TRON

[bird]

If you really can garantee (hint: you can't) that your virus won't leave your local network, then I suppose such a thing as a "good virus" is possible.

In all other cases, it dosn't matter what the virus does. The key point is that it acts without the permission of the computer owner. In particularly forcing service pack downloads is downright malicous, because those are known to be flakey, so there's a good chance of damaging the system irrecoverably in the process.

[trillianjedi]

In short. Yep.

Then it's definitely a virus, and as Bird states above, it's bad.

TJ