Welcome to the Valhalla #2 e-zine and my introduction.
Before writing this article, i looked a bit over my
old, buggy sources and the content of other ezines. It seems
time is running. ;)

I don't know when i started with writing viruses because
my old dos sources were never released in an e-zine.
I think it has been around 1997 and 1998 when a friend of mine
gave me the virus creation laboratory, some vx tutorials and 
the last words of the mentor on some floppy discs (i could
not download them by myself because i did not have a modem
and an internet connection;). I still love the following
quote from one of these tuorials (dark angels phunky virus 
writing guide):

"Virii are wondrous creations written for the sole purpose of 
spreading and destroying the systems of unsuspecting fools. 
This eliminates the systems of simpletons who can't tell 
that there is a problem when a 100 byte file suddenly blossoms 
into a 1,000 byte file. Duh. These low-lifes do not deserve to 
exist, so it is our sacred duty to wipe their hard drives off 
the face of the Earth." xD

I found my first win32 virus attempt in Coderz #1
which was released in november, 2000. Calling it an 
attempt is the right description: I used APIs like 
"WinExec()" because "CreateProcess()" needed too 
many parameters and i did not understand how to 
use them ;) But anyway, it was still a magic time,
many active virus authors were hosted on coderz.net and
visited #virus on undernet (which is now a broken shadow
of it former self).

Ok, i just recognize that im talking about the good old
times which is an indicator for getting old ;) But don't
listen to old suckers who complain that the scene is dead and
in the past everything was better. Its not true. In the past,
everybody was copying e.g. one code snippet for calculating the
delta offset and storing it in the ebp register. Who the hell
invented this shit? It makes conventional stack frames 
impossible because they need ebp. 

Even more worse, nowadays some people still believe 
some old vx turorials which recommend to
Write every task in assembler because its 1337 and the way to go.
Sorry but this is so terribly wrong: You always have to use
the programming language which provides the best, fastest
and cleanest solution. And this is in 99% of all cases
NOT assembler. Google for "Master Foo and the Ten Thousand Lines"
and you will understand.

Compared to the past, many things are better today.
We have nowadays good pages like vxheavens.com 
which contain last collections of tutorials and virus history.
We have so many pages dedicated to programming (which teach you all 
kind of programming languages and good coding guide lines),
math, microcontrollers, etc. Furthermore, you can visit more 
than 200 days/year it-sec conferences. And there are still 
many people who write articles and code things related to 
malware. The only difference is that they don't call 
themselfs "vxers" but "security researchers".

Ok, enough said, enjoy the zine :-)

belial - nullsecurity.net