I don't find this code paricularly interesting and don't think encouraging people to look in this direction is a good idea. I'd rather you had just kept the code to yourself or found something more useful to spend your time on.

I find that these types of things are usually built up in stages and someone getting the idea to write a Perl virus and then actually going all the way to creating a non-trivial, mallicious virus is rather unlikely. But one person getting it started and then another adding to it, etc. is quite likely to end up with someone eventually producing something that I'd much rather never get produced. Part of the reason for this is that each little step along the way is a much easier moral decision based on the existance of the previous work.

I don't know if a non-trivial virus can be written in Perl. I don't really want to find out.

I'd appreciate having this not be approved for its section and having the code removed from it. While I don't find researching malware to be immoral, I do find releasing malware seeds to the world to be exactly that.

(updated to add "code" to the first line. Thanks to jepri for noting that I was not being clear there.)

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

In reply to (tye)Re: Immoral? by tye
in thread Morality of posting Perl "virus" code? by tachyon

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.