As part of the EPP Ph.D. program, each student spends a semester a manages an undergraduate student project. These are very broad projects and the final project is a 100-200 page report on the topic. In the past they’ve covered issues such as brownfields leeching into Pittsburgh, hybrid vehicles, and emergency response stuff. This semester, I got recruited to help out with a project on Spyware. Apparently I’m the most qualified grad student they could find right now. This isn’t to say that I’m not qualified for it, but it was with a bit of reluctance that I took on the task. It should be a good time.
To get the students familiar I’ve decided to infect my laptop with as much spyware as I can find. Well, not really. My laptop runs Linux and there isn’t much spyware for Linux. But I do have VMWare, which lets me run Windows in a virtual machine. It also lets me checkpoint the system and roll it back from a spyware infection, really a great technique for testing. As another bonus, I can then capture all traffic to the network using Ethereal.
So here comes my problem, it’s actually rather hard to get my computer infect with spyware. I’ve managed to find the old versions of Kazaa and Bearshare, which should do an okay job. I’ve also found the funwebproducts stuff too. But I’d like some REALLY mean stuff. So, if anyone knows of something that’s a downright trojan, like connects to a remote IRC server and becomes a bot slave, let me know, or zip it up and email it to me.