I do find releasing malware seeds to the world to be exactly that.
I don't know. To me, that seems akin to the old mantra "security through obscurity." That is, the "don't-talk-about-it-so-people-won't-think-about-it" kind of mentality always seems to backfire. I, for one, am intrigued by this post; but certainly not in a malicious sense. I am interested because in order to solve problems (if we would want to classify this as such), you must identify the problem and provide proof of concept, which is what
tachyon did.
To me, the real discussion should now become "how providing solutions to this problem". We should discuss making sure non-privileged users (or lowest neccesary priveleged users) are running Perl scripts. We should talk about verifying code found "in the wild" before running it, etc. Then, after coming up with a way to prevent this sorta thing from happening, we can return to the original problem and see if we can get around the solution we came up with.
Do you disagree with
BugTraq? They often talk about and provide proofs of concept for code and techniques that could easily be maliciously employed.
In the end, to me, this could be turned into a very valuable discussion. Granted, the code could be modified in such a way to
only provide proof of concept rather than executing that concept at all. But, I find nothing wrong with it.
Jeremy
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