Ok, so this is going to sound a bit odd, but does anyone know where I can purposefully download spyware and virues?

We are going to be doing a demonstration at work during our Open House of the effects of viruses and spyware on a system (1 protected, the other not) and I need something to throw at them.

The spyware should be easy enough, I'll just install Gator and a few file sharing apps. But the viruses are a little trickier since people tend to not want them for any reason.

I HEREBY ABSOLVE YOU FROM ANY RESPONSIBILITY FOR DAMAGE DONE TO MY MACHINE AS A RESULT OF INFORMATION YOU POST

In fact, it's probably best that if you have any information for this, you send it to me in a PM. This is not the kind of information we want someone to accidentally click on and infect their machines or make well-known for any script kiddies out there.

Thanks!

go browse some random shady pron on IE (turn your security setting to low) and that should do it for ya

also google might be able to help, I know there are a few viri you can download to "test" your system.

install some random programs that scream of spyware (like kazaa, office, exeem)

edit: after looking at eclair, I think that it's intent is to be non malicious, but to test the programs, so if your intent is to slow the system down that won't work...

also, if you can wait a week or two I can do a hdd image of one or 2 teenagers unmonitored/unspywared machines, those seem to be good when it comes to this.

office has spyware??

is's M$ ain't it ?

It's probably some program mistakenly seeing their "User Experience Improvement" (or whatever it's called) program as collecting system data and sending it to MS. This is an optional component of Office that you have to opt-in to for it to run. It's goal is to monitor crashes and how people are using the software to provide a better user experience in future releases.

Our open house is June 2, so that's the timetable I'm looking at. I'm thinking I'll probably use an unpatched Windows 98 machine to further exacerbate the maliciousness.

that was no joke, that really happened. That is an undoctored screenshot.

For thos not knowing what he is talking about, just after installing Windows XP SP2 on my AMD64 machine, it enables a feature called "Data Execution Prevention" (from a Windows perspective) or No Execute (from the CPU perspective). Not long after, I got this message:



It requires Windows XP SP2 and a compatible processor to work (Athlon64 or newer Pentium 4's, forget when Intel added this feature).

so what happens is you mistype google(which people often do) and you get bugged because of it... LOL that sucks but its kinda clever.

so what happens is you mistype google(which people often do) and you get bugged because of it... LOL that sucks but its kinda clever.

That's the only time I've EVER gotten spyware on Firefox...a friend went to goggle.com and I got like 12 infections. I don't think I've ever had more than 2 on FF and that was a long time ago.