As I mentioned in my last blog article here (quite a while ago), I’m no longer listing all my current blog output here. However, this seems a suitable place to start gathering some of my papers and articles together. Starting with my Virus Bulletin papers…
At Virus Bulletin 1997 I presented not only my first Virus Bulletin paper, but my first ever conference paper, and my first presentation outside the workplace. At the time I was working for the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now merged into Cancer Research UK), so the contact details are totally wrong. More importantly, it was written when OS X was still under development and before Microsoft cleaned up its act as regards Office’s susceptibility to malicious macros, so it’s of mostly historical interest. Fortunately, hardly anyone came to the presentation, which was probably my second worst of all time, but the paper was pretty much authoritative for the time.
So here’s the paper.
David Harley, Macs and Macros – the State of the Macintosh Nation, Virus Bulletin Conference Proceedings, 1997. Copyright is held by Virus Bulletin Ltd, but is made available on this site for personal use free of charge by permission of Virus Bulletin.
ABSTRACT
The Apple Macintosh has received little recent attention from virus writers or, indeed, anti-virus researchers. Though the number of native Mac viruses has stayed virtually static for several years, the recent upsurge of macro viruses has not left the Macintosh community unscathed. Many viruses which infect Microsoft Office applications will do so as happily on a Macintosh as on a PC. Even Mac users who don’t use vulnerable applications or application versions may, without appropriate anti-virus software, unknowingly pass on infected files. Many Mac sites, however, are only just waking up to these facts, belatedly and expensively. This paper briefly reviews the shared history of viruses and the Mac, summarizes the current situation and considers future possibilities and strategies.
One down, 13 to go.
David Harley CITP FBCS CISSP
Small Blue-Green World/Mac Virus
ESET Senior Research Fellow
The Geek Peninsula 