How to create Antivirus software

Discussion in 'Engineering Concepts' started by nurul, Jun 20, 2008.

  1. nurul

    nurul New Member

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    Does anyone know of an expert who knows how to create antivirus software?

    I am willing to pay for some consultancy.

    Thanks
     
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  2. neo_vi

    neo_vi Member

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    creating a stable version of anti virus isn't an easy task to accomplish. First u shud learn all the basic ideas, like what s a virus, wat it ll do, what s a trojan,trojan dropper. and in what way it affects the system files. after that u have to start programming for that.
     
  3. shabbir

    shabbir Administrator Staff Member

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    Architecturally the anti virus software is very difficult as you should be able to accommodate new viruses as and when they come.
     
  4. honeyboy_20

    honeyboy_20 New Member

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    So what is the steps to start learn how to make simple anti-virus or in another word what is the book i should read to develop my skills to make it in one of days.
     
  5. neo_vi

    neo_vi Member

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    learn assembling and disassembling and heuristics things. I don't know wat books to follow.
     
  6. xpi0t0s

    xpi0t0s Mentor

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    It's a big job to write decent AV software and anyone that's going to be paying you even the minimum hourly rate is going to want some significant differences between that and, say, just using AVG.

    You need to understand how viruses work, of course. That much is obvious. That may involve setting up a test machine that can get infected, and it would be useful if it didn't take you out with it.
    You need to determine, for each virus, how it infects executables, what to look for to determine that the executable has been infected (just looking for changes to that executable isn't enough because the user may simply have upgraded their software), and you need to do that for all executable filetypes and all filetypes that can contain executable code, including Windows bugs that may or may not be known about.
    You need to be aware of viruses that change their patterns to avoid detection and also there are viruses out there that employ anti-detection techniques.
    Then you need to determine if the executable can be fixed or if the virus has overwritten critical program code that cannot be restored without reinstalling the program.

    Today, my AVG Free reports that it has 1,659,254 definitions installed.
    Let's take an extremely conservative assumption that 1 virus = 1 hour's work. Certainly there will be some overlap, work you do for one virus will not need redoing for another virus that works along similar lines. However I reckon it would take more than an hour to analyse even well known viruses.
    That's 189 years' work. Continuous work that is, without breaks.
    Or 864 years if you work 8 hours/day, 240 days/year.

    What's your hourly rate? Current UK minimum wage £5.73 per hour for workers aged 22 years and older (and bear in mind that as a professional programmer you're NOT just going to want the minimum wage). That's £9.5 million. AVG Internet Security Network Edition is £198.58 for a year's subscription, or over 47,800 years.

    Great work if you can get it. But what are they getting for their £9.5m/864 year wait that they wouldn't get from AVG, except source code? And I bet you could get the AVG source code if you waved enough cash at them, and that's probably a lot less than £9.5 million. Or that they wouldn't get from ClamWin/Clam?

    If you just want to do open source in the AV realm, why not consider contributing to one of the existing open source projects? There are 103 current antivirus projects open at SourceForge, the most popular of which is ClamWin.
     
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  7. neo_vi

    neo_vi Member

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    good info man. People won't believe when we say" its tough to create antivirus software" but with this stuff they ll start to believe.
     
  8. TechnoDemon

    TechnoDemon New Member

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    First, as the first post, i'd like to say...
    THIS FORUM ROCKS!!!!!!!!! A place that gather the high-lvl programmer

    back to topic
    I'm interested in AV, too.
    I've just finished my beta AV and it looks like sh*t. I have no idea how to design the interface.

    Note: I use MS VB
     
  9. nklant

    nklant New Member

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    Hahahaha "I just finished it, and it lookes like shit" :happy: Well I think you should do something about it then... Try Microsoft Visual Studio for the interface and everything else.
     
  10. ShaunDsouza

    ShaunDsouza New Member

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    great information dude, actually I was looking to as valuable information as this.
    Thanks for sharing...
     
  11. David01Boon

    David01Boon New Member

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    Hi, xpi0t0s
    I think you've written a good article about How to create Antivirus software.
    I have gain nice information by you.
     
  12. ShaunDsouza

    ShaunDsouza New Member

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    [FONT=&quot]A computer is a necessary and important tool and equipment for getting things done these days. Because the popularity and functionality of the machines are phenomenal, it is not surprising that there are also as numerous viruses, threats and spasm that threaten to destroy and alter the computer systems. thats why we create Antivirus software.
    [/FONT]
     
  13. mmr.maniratnam

    mmr.maniratnam New Member

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    actually may just creatin a shredder wil be enough i hope (just an idea dude !)
     
  14. ali_akbar

    ali_akbar New Member

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    well i to think creating an antivirus is a hectic job.
     
  15. ansarialice

    ansarialice New Member

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    hello guys i also try
     
  16. goutham22

    goutham22 New Member

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    thank you forgiving the information but ia wan tot know the intial what i want to learn to create a anti virus programm
     
  17. xpi0t0s

    xpi0t0s Mentor

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    I would disagree that AV software is architecturally very difficult. All it needs to do is to check every file on the system against every virus in its database. That's very easy to do; the only complexity really is how to determine if a specific file has a specific virus, and even that is not difficult, you have to know how a virus works and what to look for. There are a couple of other things: you need to check for bootblock viruses, and if possible you should repair or otherwise quarantine the file, being careful not to compromise the user's system by detecting a false positive in a critical system file.
    Code:
    for each file F
    {
      for each virus V
      {
        does F contain V?
        yes: fix or quarantine, alert user
      }
    }
    
    AVG currently has 2,974,423 virus definitions, and across drives C, E and Z I have nearly 450,000 files, not counting the files within archive/zip files. That's 1,338,490,350,000 individual checks it has to perform. That number can be reduced significantly as some viruses only infect some kinds of files, e.g. Excel viruses only need to be checked against .xls files, and some file types (.txt for example) cannot be infected.

    AVG also provides a "resident shield" which attempts to detect viruses as they activate, which also helps decrease the amount of filesystem checking an AV program has to do.
     
  18. King Falcon

    King Falcon New Member

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    i think it is difficult to create a Good AV...
    because except you must have a lot of viruses in database, you must can kill a virus process...
    some virus is very hard to kill...
     
  19. Scripting

    Scripting John Hoder

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    Can you post your beta AV on some server plz, upload it and post a link plz. thx
     
  20. luvfed

    luvfed New Member

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    anyone plz mail me basics of creating an antivirus or some project idea for major project in java
    it'll be really helpful
    plz
    plz
    plz
    my email id is: monikatomar1990@gmail.com
     

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