Re: Virus detected in the blockchain

I'm not sure what the right forum for this is, here, or in the Technical forum, but I figure it'll get read more here, so I'm posting here...

My computer (Windows 7 64 bit) was acting strange so I just ran a full virus scan. It detected two viruses and one of them just happened to be in the blockchain. It was detected in Bitcoin\Blocks\blk00129.dat. Those of you running full nodes, especially on Windows, this would be a good time to run a virus scanner. Avast caught this, I can't comment on any others.

i think thats a false flag.

some crap virus scanners dont detect actual viruses, they just have lists of filenames, and it happens to be that a certain old virus from the 1990's had a filename called blk00129.dat.

i kinda remember someone posting about this last year

That's a very crappy way of detecting malicious software. If you'd just rename the virus it would evade that virus scanner altogether. What a joke.

Virus scanners that scan your hard drive for viruses are pretty bad in the first place. You should have a virus scanner that blocks the download before you download it, that's way more efficient than trying to repair the damage after it is already done.

I can't believe you are running a full node and possibly a wallet on a computer without a proper virus scanner.

I don't think it is always possible to prevent a virus from being downloaded in the first place as the file could potentially be part of another file or the user could be tricked into overriding the virus scanner because they think the file is actually legit when it is not, or the virus could be introduced via some other means then being downloaded, or the virus is a 0 day attack and the virus scanner does not realize that it is a virus until after it receives an update.

Quote from: BlindMayorBitcorn on October 04, 2014, 11:52:21 PM

Quote from: HELP.org on October 04, 2014, 11:47:31 PM

It is just a piece of the virus that triggers the signature detection algorithm so it can't do anything. I ran ClamWin a couple weeks ago and it found about 5 or 6 signatures in the blockchain files in addition to the "stoned" one that gets detected by many scanners.

That thing is like a time capsule of lulz Cheesy

There are a lot of....interesting....things on the blockchain from Bitcoin's earlier days