2005/02/25 goat

In The Art of Virus Research and Defense, Peter Szor explains that a goat file is a specially prepared file designed to make it easier to see exactly how a virus under investigation infects its targets. Of course, savvy virus creators have become aware of this and now employ "anti-goat" measures, avoiding othe more obvious goats (large areas of repeating bytes where code or data might normally be).

Peter does mention the use of VMWare in virus work, but I can't help wondering why they don't use virtual device drivers that could just trap everything written and read and log it for later perusal. For enough money (and money isn't lacking in this field), I bet you could get someone like Seagate to build such a capability right into the firmware of a standard drive and turn it on or off with a switch - making it even more invisible.

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