Going viral hasn't always been considered good. Whether you're fighting the common cold, or trying to remove the ILOVEYOU computer worm from your corporate file server, two things are certain: your immune system is based on your gut health, and computers have really poor gut health.

Stopping viruses is hard. The main reason for this is that viruses are really clever. They've evolved over time to escape detection. Each previously detected virus allows the next iteration of the virus to become more resillient. The second reason is that your computer's gut health has to fight every virus, whereas each virus just has to find one immunocompromised system to survive.

Let's work out how viruses hide. How to they sneak past the checkpoints. How they attach themselves to your system. How they fight detection, and removal. We'll look at aspects such as self-replication, cryptographic obfuscation, and touch on methods of delivery and infection.

Now that you're thinking like a virus writer, you can anticipate which areas of your applications need hardening. Just remember, we're doing it for good, not profit :)

This presentation will feature live demos of writing PHP viruses, and infection of willing targets. The theories apply equally to many languages, so an understanding of PHP is not required.

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Max Roeleveld at 16:35 on 30 Jun 2017

Blowing up a gallery app, what's not to like? Speaker should definitely have the audience take a pledge of sorts, though, just in case...

Very good talk. Informative an fun!

Anonymous at 16:47 on 30 Jun 2017

Presentation style was very good, clear and fun to listen to, even if I don't feel live demo's are as good as well prepared recorded demo's. But content-wise this was very much more entry level than expected, this is kinda 1995 parent's attic level virus writing, I was hoping to see a bit more about the more advanced techniques used by viruses that I could'nt think up myself so easily.

Robert at 19:28 on 1 Jul 2017

The content was more entertaining than that it actually taught on how to write a virus but this is OK since I didn't expect much more. The speaker seemed well prepared and there were some good jokes which made it a good watch.

A good talk to get insight in how malicious code could work.