THE PRESS - PART 2!
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  It appears as if the 'Australian Institute of Hackers' (AIH) as mentioned
  in the last issue of VLAD, not only exist but have been around for two
  years and are very prolific.  They have done something like twenty viruses
  of varying quality, most being shit but some like Australian.1149
  (TSR EXE/COM Polymorph) and Australian.1024 (TSR COM/Stealth MBR) show that
  they are good!  Their members are Dark Fiber, Australian Parasite and Cyber
  Crack.  They seem to have been inactive since 1993 except for the
  following...

  In reply to the article written about them in the October issue of PC User
  (Printed in VLAD#2), the AIH have written a letter to the editor of the
  magazine.  It can be found on pages 9-10 of the December issue of
  Australian PC User.

  I won't bother adding any smart alec comments this time :)

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   Virus Writers Reply

   Personally we [Australian Parasite and me] think the Aussie virus scene
   is in an OK kind of state at the moment.  There are not many of us here
   that write viruses, and some are just lammers rehashing other people's
   work.  We never really could understand the paranoia that surrounds them.
   It's just a little piece of code, but to see the faces of people when they
   say "Oh my God, I've got a virus, I'll have to reformat my 600Gb hard
   disk" is great.
        It's unbeleivable how badly people react.  It separates the men/women
   from the boys/girls.  The easiest way to remove a virus is to get one of
   the virus writers to write you an antidote.  It's very simple and
   painless.  All it takes is a copy of the virus to analyse.
        We'd also like to blow away the myth of "pirates get what they
   deserve".  Viruses are less likely to travel on pirated games than the
   shareware stuff from bulletin board systems.  Why ?  Because most of the
   sysops who run underground boards aren't morons.  How often do you hear
   about people getting hit by pirated games compared to trojan shareware
   utilities ?  The exception to this was when Nuke worked their way through
   INC and THG.  Look at the amount of trojans around now.  They are mostly
   shareware stuff: few, if any, are games.
        Of course the Anti-Virus folk benefit.  We don't get any money from
   doing this but they do.  They live off us.  And don't say that if there
   were no viruses there would be no anti-virus programmers.  If the anti's
   stopped updating scanners then we (the Australian Institute if Hackers)
   would consider this victory and cease to write them.  This one of the
   reasons why we create viruses.  To create, mutate, live, travel and
   experience.  Stephen W. Hawkins defends our actions: in his eyes we create
   artificial life forms.  And that comes from a highly regarded scientist.
        Pam Keanes' comments that viruses could not be the work of kids
   bewilders me.  I learnt assembler when I was 15.  Writing a virus is a
   very easy thing to do.  A simple memory resident, non-overwriting COM
   infector would take 10 mintues to write from scratch.  Stealth is also
   a pretty easy thing to develop.  It's like writing a cheat mode - you only
   have to trap and monitor.
        Dark Avenger's MTE is good, but no virus writer worth their salt
   willingly uses other peoples code: only lammers do this.  Studying it
   and modifying it severely is another matter altogether, and is not seen
   as an act of 'lammerism'.
        In our expert opinion we think Scan 2.0 is the best detection 
   program -- here's ou quick rundown.
     
     Scan 2.0: Quick, scans more than any other and cleans pretty good too.
     Easier to trojanise than the old style Scan.

     Vbuster: Not too bad.  A nice range of utilities most people will never
     use.  Detects quite a few, and cleans a couple.

     VET: Too few options, and kludgy to use.  Does not scan many at all.

     Norton: Nice menu system, but too expensive and does not detect as many
     as Scan 2.

     MS Anti-Virus: Wouldn't trust this as far as we could throw it.  CPAV
     was bad, but this cut-down version is dire.  Finds few, cleans even less
     and too much hassle to update.

     Thunderbyte: We hate it!

                                        'DARK FIBER'
                     Australian Institute of Hackers


   -As you can see, we publish anything within reason (and occasionally
    without reason).  This should not be construed as supporting this vile
    practice. -- ED

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  Note the editor wrote, 'vile practice' - obviously an unbiased media there.

  Perhaps lemmings is a creation of theirs ?

  I liked it how they recommended Scan as their favourite.  Very cunning.
  As we all know it's a piece of shit and Thunderbyte is the best.
  
                        qark