18 Jul
2001
18 Jul
'01
5:07 p.m.
Rumor has it that Tony Duell may have mentioned these words:
Either that, or it's a typo on NAV's website...
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger --- sysadmin, Iceberg Computers
Recycling is good, right??? Ok, so I'll recycle an old .sig.
If at first you don't succeed, nuclear warhead
disarmament should *not* be your first career choice.
Rumor has it that Glenatacme(a)aol.com may have mentioned
these words:
> I looked this virus up in the list of 50K+ virii
that NAV currently
claims to
> cover. No information was available, except that
this virus is rare, it
> infects .exe files, and it is zero bytes in length.
>
> Now, I've cranked out a couple of boatloads of code over the last 19
years,
> and the smallest useful program I ever wrote was 3
bytes in length. It's
> easy enough to create a zero byte file, but as far as I can tell such a
file
> can't *do* anything.
>
> How can I write a zero-byte program? How does NAV identify this virus if
> it's zero bytes in length? What real threat to my PC is an
e-mail-propagated
virus of
length zero?
My guess (never having seen this virus, and certainly never having
written a virus) is that the code is not 0 bytes long (for the obvious
reason), but that it overwrites some bytes in the files it infects rather
than addting itself to the file, so the file remains the same size.
So the _change_ in file size is 0 bytes.