Back Orifice author develops new Trojan
The author of Back Orifice, Sir Dystic who is a leading hacker at Cult of the Dead Cow, has revealed plans to develop an ingenious new Trojan technique that has even got anti-virus experts impressed.
"I have been working on turning any piece of commercial software that provides remote access to a computer like PC Anywhere into an executable," he told ZDNet last week. "It wouldn't be very difficult to configure it so that it would work behind the scenes and then anti-virus software that scans for things like Back Orifice wouldn't be able to detect that, would it?"
Sir Dystic made the revelation while visiting Britain to explain to concept of moral hacking to UK companies.
Sir Dystic denied there were any malicious intentions behind the endeavour preferring to describe it as "an effort to force software manufacturers to improve their software." He added: "Do you think if I called up Microsoft and said 'hey your whole operating system is insecure' they'd do anything?"
When questioned about his new idea for disguising remote Trojan horse attacks, CEO and president of Finjan anti-virus Bill Lyons admitted it was an interesting concept. "I think that is a very clever idea. Instead of trying to build something like Back Orifice, just using software that's already there and hacking into the code of that."
Lyons also conceded that this technique would beat Finjan's latest anti-virus software First-Strike which allows only certain executables placed on a "white list" to be activated on a computer. However Lyons said the experts at Finjan's labs should have little problem dealing with the new approach.
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