chromatic posted an obfucation here Seekers of Perl Obfuscation that demonstrates some very interesting behaviour of SEEK when used on the <DATA> handle. While deconstructing this it struck me that this could very well be used to generate self modifying script code and what better to use as a proof of concept than a virus.

Now a perl virus is not really the same as a .exe virus in that the source is in plain view and *nix permissions prevent a lot of random file tampering by malicious code. Still I am troubled by the morality of posting such code. Is this immoral, ammoral or does it have an interesting moral of some practical use?

I could imagine using this to modify the configuration variables of a script automatically for instance so that the script automatically hard codes its configuration rather than using external files.

Code has been removed by author.

cheers

tachyon

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