He is known as Kopa masum for creating an annoying virus called “Kopa Virus”. But as a guy he is a wonderful and kind person. Following interview will show it by the way. Masum is working at Trippertlabs as an action script developer. I had a chance to take his interview regarding this virus and what happened later. Let’s follow the interview…

Q : You are known as “Kopa Masum” among your BUET friends, colleagues etc. How does it feel it to be kopa Masum
A: Well the name dosn’t sound good, but when somebody says that about me, i feel like yah, i might have done something good! though it was not a good thing for people suffering due to some annoying features of the virus

Q : Was it just for fun…
A : Yah it was just for fun

Q : Did you have fun when you saw the effect?
A : Well initially the effects in my class and university was quite funny, my friends did enjoyed those things too. but when it started to propagate through the country, first in Dhaka and then outside of the country. i was getting impressions of general users that it was very annoying and harmed their work and regular use of the computer. then someday i found it to propagate outside of the country, even in network

Q : Wow, how many computers were infected, any guess?
A : I don’t have any exact count as not every computers infected have internet connections and sometimes it was difficult for me to track where it is going. but as it was traceable, i guess it’s about 1/2 millions

Q : Holy cow!
A : It was spreading like real viruses and it’s growth rate increased day by day before i stopped everything from my control unit hosted in a server

Q : So it was YOU who stopped the virus first?
A : I stopped it for mainly the complain i got from many users that it was really annoying and harmed their daily works. i had no intentions of harming people with my creations. it was made just for fun. so i decided to stop that

Q : Of course not! But then why did you keep the name “Kopa” ? you know lots of friends asked me this question on twitter
A : Well that was the funny story about one of our teachers of buet

Q : Would you like to share
A : We had a teacher in buet i don’t want to spread his name, but students including my friends named him as Mr. Kopa. we all enjoyed his classes due to his funny attitude

Q : I see, so was there any reason behind creating this virus to annoy that teacher?
A : Well before i created the virus, i helped many friends to remove viruses from their pc. i liked to fight against viruses without using any help from the anti viruses. and then i decided to make one which will be different and will not be detected by the anti viruses. so i tried the other way. but doing the rnd helped me a lot in finding some severe security holes in windows xp service pack 2

Q : Would you like to share how technically it worked, or you want to keep it as a secret?
A : Sure , it was built using c. i started with a basic windows program with a message loop. then i just created the program such that it runs as a normal program but is invisible but also not a service. windows services needs to have access rights. then running the program in background. i build my own scripting language, which the program was able to compile and run in the infected machine. the script i wrote and saved in my server. all the programs infecting different computers download the script and compile that script. then they know what is the command sent to them by me. they find their job to do for the session the computer is running script was very much customizable and if i wanted to format user’s hard disks i could have done it easily with my scripts written in the server

Q : That’s really scary, i should call you a “Kind hacker”
A: The agents (the virus infecting the pcs) don’t have any harmful codes. so it was difficult for the anti viruses to detect it as a harmful program. all the instructions for it to do was written in a text script file, which is also not understandable by the anti viruses. because the language is defined by me. so i was successful in this case that no anti virus could detect it when i checked with them. and i was feeling like i’m the winner in the battle :p

Q : Does it mean you can create lots of annoying viruses that dont create any harm for computers, as anti-virus can’t detect them?
A: Not really, anti viruses check for many other things. and to make a successful virus u need to behave just like a useful program the user is using :p it could write anywhere, a textfield was enough for it to start writing automatically. for example one of my friend told me that he was chatting with his gf. while the kopa started to chat with her :p and it took some time for my friend to make her understand the fact. two classes in buet were suspended due to this

Q : Ha ha ha ok lets come to latest windows OS…What’s your opinion about Win7 security system
A : Well Microsoft always things about there business. they have the capability to secure, but i think they won’t. vista disappointed us all in terms of security. though bill tried to say that it was more secure than xp. but not actually. win 7 is much better but still is not enough to defend against virus makers. windows is still vulnerable to network attacks and that is the most scary thing

Q : So are you up to any RnD on Win7 security hole?
A : well i can tell you, for now i don’t have any intention to create troubles for general users, and see them cursing me rather if i do something, i might try to help people to secure their systems against these type of attacks. but actually anti viruses can’t do much to secure u. if the user have some knowledge about hoe these things work, then they can protect themselves

Q : Ok, a different question, do you use any anti-virus on your computer?
A : No i don’t

Q : Which OS do you use?
A : I Use xp, i prefer that and Ubuntu is my favorite

Q : Ubuntu is my favorite too, we are at the end of our conversation, do you have anything else to say?
A : Another thing i missed. the security hole was named as “Remote code execution vulnerability” by Microsoft, they released a patch later

Q : You made them work man! Thanks for your time…
A : Thanks a lot for taking my interview

That’s it, I know you might have lot more questions to Masum, he promised me if you ask any questions, he will answer here. So shoot with more questions here

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