Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 5th Nov 2009 17:29 UTC
Computers are taking on ever more important roles in our daily lives. They used to be simple tools to get simple things done - work-related, mostly, maybe a few simple games, and that was it. However, over time, they have become the central hubs for all sorts of data - including precious data. For his Master of Fine Arts thesis project, Zach Gage illustrated just how important our computer data has become.
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Member since:2005-07-06
Actually, pretty harmless stuff that is generally classified as "distributed computing" software.
That's interesting. From what you said, re the software running in the background eating resources and therefore looking malware-ish, is it picked up based on heuristic detection? Or is this behaviour somehow causing anti-malware vendors to add it to their signature lists?
I must admit that my first (naive, I hope!!!) impulse was to think that, perhaps, some script kiddies try to improve their scores in distributed computation competitions by trojanning their clients onto others' machines. I can just about imagine this being done but it's not something I've thought about before. Have you ever known this happen?
Member since:2006-01-26
That's interesting. From what you said, re the software running in the background eating resources and therefore looking malware-ish, is it picked up based on heuristic detection? Or is this behaviour somehow causing anti-malware vendors to add it to their signature lists?
Ah, that's an excellent question indeed.
In the cases I have seen reported - the anti-malware vendors had specifically labeled the product as such (giving it a "name" and everything).
Thus, it wasn't necessarily the behavior of the software, but rather someone having reported the behavior of the software to the vendor.
I must admit that my first (naive, I hope!!!) impulse was to think that, perhaps, some script kiddies try to improve their scores in distributed computation competitions by trojanning their clients onto others' machines. I can just about imagine this being done but it's not something I've thought about before. Have you ever known this happen?
Oh indeed. In fact, there have been known-reported trojans out there whose sole purpose was to install a distributed computing app in a hidden location and start it running. In those cases, the app being dropped by the trojan is not the malware, however, but the trojan itself.
Fortunately, in almost all cases where this behavior has been detected, the projects have blacklisted the user and removed all their statistics. Almost every distributed project out there makes a disclaimer that installation of the software on a machine without the owners permission is illegal and subject to fines and or imprisonment (or both).
In some cases, I even suspect system admins for corporations likely are finding the software installed by some employee (perhaps who is no longer working there), and probably reports it as malware. Again, this is not a case of the software being malware, but rather an abuse of corporate resources. The same argument could be used if someone was using a corporation's high-end server to compile nightly builds for some large FOSS project - and yet gcc is not malware
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Member since:
2006-01-26
Actually, pretty harmless stuff that is generally classified as "distributed computing" software.
Examples include BOINC, distributed.net's dnetc, Seventeen or Bust's sb.exe client, etc.
Being a member of several distributed computing forums and mailing lists (and even committing changes to some of them), I often see people reporting "<some famous company>'s antivirus product has flagged <some app> as malware, how can we get it removed from their list?".
Often times the very purpose of the software is what causes it to be labeled malware, namely: It runs in the background (often as a service, or program that starts up automatically), it eats up CPU resources, it downloads new work, and uploads results to the server, it reports some basic usage info (for statistics purposes).
While these activities don't destroy data, neither does the majority of malware out there. Most of it is classified as malware simply because it's running without the user's knowledge, regardless of what it actually does.