Comments on: Can ‘digital ants’ cripple worms like Conficker and Koobface? http://lastwatchdog.com/digital-ants-cripple-worms-conficker-koobface/ on Internet security by Byron Acohido Sat, 19 May 2012 12:59:58 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.4 By: Graham Cluley, Sophos http://lastwatchdog.com/digital-ants-cripple-worms-conficker-koobface/#comment-768 Graham Cluley, Sophos Wed, 23 Sep 2009 13:50:00 +0000 http://lastwatchdog.com/?p=2884#comment-768 This sounds awfully like a variation the concept of "good viruses" that people outside of the mainstream of the anti-virus industry have proposed many times over the last 20 years. Unfortunately using "good viruses" or "anti-virus viruses" to fight malware is quite a bad idea, for a number of reasons - some technical, some legal, some practical. Vesselin Bontchev of Frisk Software wrote an excellent paper which discussed the challenges that "good viruses" have to overcome. As he discusses the issues far more competently and completely than I would in a blog post, I'll just provide a link. :) http://www.people.frisk-software.com/~bontchev/papers/goodvir.html This sounds awfully like a variation the concept of “good viruses” that people outside of the mainstream of the anti-virus industry have proposed many times over the last 20 years.

Unfortunately using “good viruses” or “anti-virus viruses” to fight malware is quite a bad idea, for a number of reasons – some technical, some legal, some practical.

Vesselin Bontchev of Frisk Software wrote an excellent paper which discussed the challenges that “good viruses” have to overcome. As he discusses the issues far more competently and completely than I would in a blog post, I’ll just provide a link. :)

http://www.people.frisk-software.com/~bontchev/papers/goodvir.html

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