There has been a right hoohah in the media and blogosphere about the “Race To Zero” contest being arranged for the next Defcon conference. In a nutshell, the “Race To Zero” organisers think it’s a good idea to encourage people to create new malware variants in order to test anti-virus products.
The idea of running a virus-writing competition isn’t a new one of course. In fact, they stretch back at least 15 years.
In 1993, Mark Ludwig, the author of “The Little Black Book of Computer Viruses” and a virus writer himself, publicised what he called the “First International Virus Writing Competition” and urged participants to send in DOS-based functional parasitic viruses. The one which was the smallest (in other words, took up the least…
Read more in my article on the Naked Security website.
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