View and vote on the article here: Red-Library Link Review: VX Heavens
Red-Library Link Review: VX Heavens| Category | | | Summary | Site Title: VX Heavens
URL: http://vx.netlux.org/
Author: howlingyeti
Date: 06.13.03
First things first. I ask you to leave all your moral and ethical weapons at the door. Check that self-righteous, holier-than-thou colt .45 with the bouncer and o |
| | Body | With that unpleasant formality out of the way we can continue studying this web site. VX Heaven is a web site that is dedicated to anything relating to computer viruses. It remains rather neutral in the ethical side of this topic by refraining from saying anything but "here's the information... enjoy". There are no immature comments about wrecking people's hard drives, nor anything remotely stereotypical about 16 year old, acne-faced, single, teenage viruses writers. It's important to note that VX Heaven has many different files and texts authored by many different people, so it's safe to assume that these attitudes can be found, but the actual site itself seems rather balanced.
Essentially VX Heaven is only an archive web site. It receives content from various sources, categorizes it, stores it, and protects it. This function in it's self is a good explanation for the continued survival of this site. They are one removed from virus writers by only collecting their work and they provide a small island of stability in the chaos that is the viruses writing scene.
The site has a large library that contains many different papers and howtos written by all kinds of people, from respectable members of the computer science community to idiots that go by names like EvIlDaRkAnGeL... or some similar recycled crap. The shear variety is amazing. I read a text by someone in the anti-virus community with a psychological analysis of virus writers' motives, a guide to polymorphism for intermediate programmers, and an amateur biologist's comparison to natural predator-prey relationships used as an model for virus behavior and it's applications to stealth virus code.
The source section of the site is huge. You want to study virus source code without having to mess around with something that's been compiled and risk infecting your computer? This is a good place to start, enough said.
This is the hot zone, so to speak... almost 8000 "hot" viruses are kept in this section. These will infect your computer if you download them and execute the program. This is by far the largest collection of compiled viruses I've ever seen. This section also contains polymorphic engines of dubious ability, virus creation tools (probably trojaned...), virus simulators, and a large collection of virus magazines put out by virus writing groups, Codebreakers being my personal favorite.
HTML-speaking, this site seemed put together well. The hex-decimal background was pretty tight, the color choice was easy on the eyes, the images weren't too numerous and everything loaded reasonably fast on my 56k connection. It worked well in both Netscape and Mozilla, but I was too afraid to point Internet Explorer at this site :-).
So back to the original question... do virus harm or only ignorance? My answer is both, but only ignorance can be cured. I recommend that anyone with a passing curiosity about viruses should troll around this site, lazily picking their way through the massive amounts of files looking for something that strikes them as interesting. Read a little bit till you get bored and then move on to another file. By solving ignorance, we're at least half-way to solving a problem. Start something small with the promise of finishing something big.
--howlingyeti
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This article was imported from zZine. (original author: darkstorm)
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