Virus Artwork

[Cowpipe]

I thought it would be fun to produce some 'artwork' that was themed around malware and viruses, of course being absolutely rubbish at drawing, I only use ASCII

Here's my first piece, my imagining of what would happen if I suddenly turned evil and created a piece of ransomware...

Don't take it all too seriously, I was just mucking around on Paint trying to come up with a logo, but it's a fun idea, if anybody else is feeling creative, would love to see your visual imaginings of various viruses

 

[XhenEd]

Some malware authors are known to be creative.
The looks of some ransomwares and roguewares are sometimes awesome.

 

[Cowpipe]

Some malware authors are known to be creative.
The looks of some ransomwares and roguewares are sometimes awesome.

Have you ever seen any DOS viruses? That is creativity, along with some of the greats of Win95 too, hybris for example, an early computer worm that drew a massive spiral on your desktop, or perhaps Happy99, which gives you a nice firework display but copies itself to everyone in your address book too

http://www.wired.com/2013/10/15-awesome-looking-viruses-from-the-ms-dos-era/

 

[Petrovic]

Dos

 

[Cowpipe]

Phalcon-Skism, now that brings back memories

 

[Oxygen]

How do you make this lol?

 

[Cowpipe]

How do you make this lol?

How do you make ascii art or how do you make an animation in a dos virus?

 

[Oxygen]

How do you make ascii art or how do you make an animation in a dos virus?

Both

 

[Cowpipe]

Both

Making ASCII art is pretty easy, you can either design it in something like ASCIIPaint (https://code.google.com/p/ascii-paint/) or do as I do and just use normal text on a Paint program (MSPaint or KolourPaint etc). The kinds of characters you use are where you can get creative, typically people (certainly in the DOS ascii) use box drawing characters like: █░▒▓ and ╧╦╩╬ etc. If you look at the artwork you can start to build rough shapes from those simple characters, add some colour and things will start to take shape

As for actually doing graphics on DOS, there are multiple ways. The simplest way is to simply use the built in drawing functions in something like TurboPascal, for example Line(x,y) draws a line from one point to another and can be used to create boxes, or with diagonal lines you can create even more complex shapes, like drawing outlines of things. Basic has similar functions. Some viruses just stored the ASCII art in a string and printed it at a specific part of the screen to draw shapes.

The other way which you would definitely use if you wanted animation is to dig into 16 bit assembler and graphics mode (int 10h), here the general idea is to draw a series of shapes or ASCII characters to the screen (representing one frame), increment the position in the direction of animation (if needs be), paint over the frame on screen and then draw the next frame, repeating the process. It's known as blitting

It's been a few years since I've done any assembler programming but that's how it worked so far as I can remember

 

[Arakasi]

I used to love writing malware that changed the autoexec back on 95 98.
You could put some interesting text and pictures on their that would scare the crap out of people thinking there computer was doomed forever.

 

[Deleted member 178]

Assembler...one reason why i shifted from wannabe-hacker to fullfledge security advisor ^^

 

[Arakasi]

Dabbed in masm a bit but thats about it ...

 

[WinXPert]

I used to love writing malware that changed the autoexec back on 95 98.
You could put some interesting text and pictures on their that would scare the crap out of people thinking there computer was doomed forever.

I wrote something back in MSDOS 3.3. When you boot, AUTOEXEC.BAT won' be executed, instead a Password Prompt would greet you and 3 wrong answers the PC would reboot again.

Assembler...one reason why i shifted from wannabe-hacker to fullfledge security advisor ^^

I remember writing COM files using DEBUG. Looking back, I can't even understand what I did back then.

How do you make this lol?

http://www.panosfx.com/free-photoshop-actions/ascii-art

 

[WinXPert]

 

[Prorootect]

ONLINE ASCII conversion:

Hmm maybe this one works no more?.. : Online Image2ASCIIart - ASCII Art Converter v1.8.2 : http://www.robertecker.com/hp/research/image2asciiart.php

Too, I searched on the Web, but not tried:

Top 5 Online Sites ASCII Art Generator to Convert Image and Text : http://www.bloggerclick.com/2012/07/top-5-online-sites-ascii-art-generator.html

GlassGiant: http://www.glassgiant.com/ascii/

mastervb : http://ascii.mastervb.net/

etc etc