The Little Black Book of Computer Virus

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The Little Black Book

Computer Viruses

Volume One:

The Basic Technology

Mark A. Ludwig

American Eagle Publications, Inc.

Post Office Box 1507

Show Low, Arizona 85901

- 1996 -

Virus drawings and cover design by Steve Warner

This electronic edition of The Little Black Book of Computer Viruses is

may be copied freely in unmodified form. Please share it, upload it,

download it, etc. This document may not be distributed in printed form

or modified in any way without written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ludwig, Mark A.

The little black book of computer viruses / by Mark A. Ludwig.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

ISBN 0-929408-02-0 (v. 1) : $14.95

1. Computer viruses I. Title

QA76.76.C68L83 1990

005.8- -dc20

And God saw that it was good.

And God blessed them, saying "

Genesis 1:21,22

Be fruitful

and multiply.

Preface to the Electronic Edition

The Little Black Book of Computer Viruses has seen five

good years in print. In those five years it has opened a door to

seriously ask the question whether it is better to make technical

information about computer viruses known or not.

When I wrote it, it was largely an experiment. I had no idea

what would happen. Would people take the viruses it contained and

rewrite them to make all kinds of horrificly destructive viruses? Or

would they by and large be used responsibly? At the time I wrote,

no anti-virus people would even talk to me, and what I could find

in print on the subject was largely unimpressive from a factual

standpoint—lots of hype and fear-mongering, but very little solid

research that would shed some light on what might happen if I

released this book. Being a freedom loving and knowledge seeking

American, I decided to go ahead and do it—write the book and get

it in print. And I decided that if people did not use it responsibly, I

would withdraw it.

Five years later, I have to say that I firmly believe the book

has done a lot more good than harm.

On the positive side, lots and lots of people who desper-

ately need this kind of information—people who are responsible

for keeping viruses off of computers—have now been able to get

it. While individual users who have limited contact with other

computer users may be able to successfully protect themselves with

an off-the-shelf anti-virus, experience seems to be proving that such

is not the case when one starts looking at the network with 10,000

users on it. For starters, very few anti-virus systems will run on

10,000 computers with a wide variety of configurations, etc. Sec-

ondly, when someone on the network encounters a virus, they have

to be able to talk to someone in the organization who has the

detailed technical knowledge necessary to get rid of it in a rational

way. You can’t just shut such a big network down for 4 days while

someone from your a-v vendor’s tech support staff is flown in to

clean up, or to catch and analyze a new virus.

Secondly, people who are just interested in how things

work have finally been able to learn a little bit about computer

viruses. It is truly difficult to deny that they are interesting. The idea

of a computer program that can take off and gain a life completely

independent of its maker is, well, exciting. I think that is important.

After all, many of the most truly useful inventions are made not by

giant, secret, government-funded labs, but by individuals who have

their hands on something day in and day out. They think of a way

to do something better, and do it, and it changes the world. However,

that will never happen if you can’t get the basic information about

how something works. It’s like depriving the carpenter of his

hammer and then asking him to figure out a way to build a better

building.

At the same time, I have to admit that this experiment called

The Little Black Book has not been without its dangers. The Stealth

virus described in its pages has succeeded in establishing itself in

the wild, and, as of the date of this writing it is #8 on the annual

frequency list, which is a concatenation of the most frequently

found viruses in the wild. I am sorry that it has found its way into

the wild, and yet I find here a stroke of divine humor directed at

certain anti-virus people. There is quite a history behind this virus.

I will touch on it only briefly because I don’t want to bore you with

my personal battles. In the first printing of The Little Black Book,

the Stealth was designed to format an extra track on the disk and

hide itself there. Of course, this only worked on machines that had

a BIOS which did not check track numbers and things like that—

particularly, on old PCs. And then it did not infect disks every time

they were accessed. This limited its ability to replicate. Some

anti-virus developers commented to me that they thought this was

The Little Black Book of Computer Viruses

a poor virus for that reason, and suggested I should have done it

differently. I hesitated to do that, I said, because I did not want it to

spread too rapidly.

Not stopping at making such suggestions, though, some of

these same a-v people lambasted me in print for having published

“lame” viruses. Fine, I decided, if they are going to criticize the

book like that, we’ll improve the viruses. Next round at the printer,

I updated the Stealth virus to work more like the Pakistani Brain,

hiding its sectors in areas marked bad in the FAT table, and to infect

as quickly as Stoned. It still didn’t stop these idiotic criticisms,

though. As late as last year, Robert Slade was evaluating this book

in his own virus book and finding it wanting because the viruses it

discussed weren’t very successful at spreading. He thought this

objective criticism. From that date forward, it would appear that

Stealth has done nothing but climb the wild-list charts. Combining

aggressive infection techniques with a decent stealth mechanism

has indeed proven effective . . . too effective for my liking, to tell

the truth. It’s never been my intention to write viruses that will make

it to the wild list charts. In retrospect, I have to say that I’ve learned

to ignore idiotic criticism, even when the idiots want to make me

look like an idiot in comparison to their ever inscrutable wisdom.

In any event, the Little Black Book has had five good years

as a print publication. With the release of The Giant Black Book of

Computer Viruses, though, the publisher has decided to take The

Little Black Book out of print. They’ve agreed to make it available

in a freeware electronic version, though, and that is what you are

looking at now. I hope you’ll find it fun and informative. And if you

do, check out the catalog attached to it here for more great infor-

mation about viruses from the publisher.

Mark Ludwig

February 22, 1996

Preface to the Electronic Edition

Introduction

This is the first in a series of three books about computer

viruses. In these volumes I want to challenge you to think in new

ways about viruses, and break down false concepts and wrong ways

of thinking, and go on from there to discuss the relevance of

computer viruses in today’s world. These books are not a call to a

witch hunt, or manuals for protecting yourself from viruses. On the

contrary, they will teach you how to design viruses, deploy them,

and make them better. All three volumes are full of source code for

viruses, including both new and well known varieties.

It is inevitable that these books will offend some people.

In fact, I hope they do. They need to. I am convinced that computer

viruses are not evil and that programmers have a right to create

them, posses them and experiment with them. That kind of a stand

is going to offend a lot of people, no matter how it is presented.

Even a purely technical treatment of viruses which simply dis-

cussed how to write them and provided some examples would be

offensive. The mere thought of a million well armed hackers out

there is enough to drive some bureaucrats mad. These books go

beyond a technical treatment, though, to defend the idea that viruses

can be useful, interesting, and just plain fun. That is bound to prove

even more offensive. Still, the truth is the truth, and it needs to be

spoken, even if it is offensive. Morals and ethics cannot be deter-

mined by a majority vote, any more than they can be determined

by the barrel of a gun or a loud mouth. Might does not make right.

If you turn out to be one of those people who gets offended

or upset, or if you find yourself violently disagreeing with some-

thing I say, just remember what an athletically minded friend of

mine once told me: “No pain, no gain.” That was in reference to

muscle building, but the principle applies intellectually as well as

physically. If someone only listens to people he agrees with, he will

never grow and he’ll never succeed beyond his little circle of

yes-men. On the other hand, a person who listens to different ideas

at the risk of offense, and who at least considers that he might be

wrong, cannot but gain from it. So if you are offended by something

in this book, please be critical—both of the book and of yourself—

and don’t fall into a rut and let someone else tell you how to think.

From the start I want to stress that I do not advocate

anyone’s going out and infecting an innocent party’s computer

system with a malicious virus designed to destroy valuable data or

bring their system to a halt. That is not only wrong, it is illegal. If

you do that, you could wind up in jail or find yourself being sued

for millions. However this does not mean that it is illegal to create

a computer virus and experiment with it, even though I know some

people wish it was. If you do create a virus, though, be careful with

it. Make sure you know it is working properly or you may wipe out

your own system by accident. And make sure you don’t inadver-

tently release it into the world, or you may find yourself in a legal

jam . . . even if it was just an accident. The guy who loses a year’s

worth of work may not be so convinced that it was an accident. And

soon it may be illegal to infect a computer system (even your own)

with a benign virus which does no harm at all. The key word here

is responsibility. Be responsible. If you do something destructive,

be prepared to take responsibility. The programs included in this

book could be dangerous if improperly used. Treat them with the

respect you would have for a lethal weapon.

This first of three volumes is a technical introduction to the

basics of writing computer viruses. It discusses what a virus is, and

how it does its job, going into the major functional components of

the virus, step by step. Several different types of viruses are

developed from the ground up, giving the reader practical how-to

information for writing viruses. That is also a prerequisite for

decoding and understanding any viruses one may run across in his

2 The Little Black Book of Computer Viruses

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TheLittleBlackBookofComputerVirusesVolumeOne:TheBasicTechnologyByMarkA.LudwigAmericanEaglePublications,Inc.PostOfficeBox1507ShowLow,Arizona85901-1996-Copyright1990ByMarkA.LudwigVirusdrawingsandcoverdesignbySteveWarnerThiselectroniceditionofTheLittleBlackBookofComputerVirusesiscopyright1996byMarkA.Lu...

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