Acknowledgments
First, I would like to thank my wife Natalia for encouraging my work for over 15 years! I also thank her for accepting the lost time on all the weekends that we could have spent together while I was working on this book.
I would like to thank everybody who made this book possible. This book grew out of a series of articles and papers on computer viruses, several of which I have co-authored with other researchers over the years. Therefore, I could never adequately thank Eric Chien, Peter Ferrie, Bruce McCorkendale, and Frederic Perriot for their excellent contributions to Chapter 7 and Chapter 10.
This book could not be written without the help of many friends, great antivirus researchers, and colleagues. First and foremost, I would like to thank Dr. Vesselin Bontchev for educating me in the terminology of malicious programs for many years while we worked together. Vesselin is famous (“infamous?”) for his religious accuracy in the subject matter, and he greatly influenced and supported my research.
A big thank you needs to go to the following people who encouraged me to write this book, educated me in the subject, and influenced my research over the years: Oliver Beke, Zoltan Hornak, Frans Veldman, Eugene Kaspersky, Istvan Farmosi, Jim Bates, Dr. Frederick Cohen, Fridrik Skulason, David Ferbrache, Dr. Klaus Brunnstein, Mikko Hypponen, Dr. Steve White, and Dr. Alan Solomon.
I owe a huge thanks to my technical reviewers: Dr. Vesselin Bontchev, Peter Ferrie, Nick FitzGerald, Halvar Flake, Mikko Hypponen, Dr. Jose Nazario, and Jason V. Miller. Your encouragements, criticisms, insights, and reviews of early handbook manuscripts were simply invaluable.
I need to thank Janos Kis and Zsolt Szoboszlay for providing me access to in-the-wild virus code for analysis, in the days when the BBS was the center of the computing universe. I also need to thank Gunter May for the greatest present that an east European kid could get—a C64.
A big thanks to everybody at Symantec, especially to Linda A. McCarthy and Vincent Weafer, who greatly encouraged me to write this book. I would also like to thank Nancy Conner and Chris Andry for their outstanding editorial work. Without their help, this project simply would never have finished. I also owe a huge thanks to Jessica Goldstein, Kristy Hart, and Christy Hackerd for helping me with the publishing process all the way.
A big thanks to all past and present members of the Computer Antivirus Researchers Organization (CARO), VFORUM, and the AntiVirus Emergency Discussion (AVED) List for all the exciting discussions on computer viruses and other malicious programs and defense systems.
I would like to thank everybody at Virus Bulletin for publishing my articles and papers internationally for almost a decade and for letting me use that material in this book.
Last but not least, I thank my teacher parents and grandparents for the extra “home education” in math, physics, music, and history.
Contact Information
If you find errors or have suggestions for clarification or material you would like to see in a future edition, I would love to hear from you. I am planning to introduce clarifications, possible corrections, and new information relevant to the content of this work on my Web site. While I think we have found most of the problems (especially in those paragraphs that were written late at night or between virus and security emergencies), I believe that no such work of this complexity and size can exist without some minor nits. Nonetheless, I made all the efforts to provide you with “trustworthy” information according to the best of my research knowledge.
Peter Szor,
Santa Monica, CA
[email protected]
http://www.peterszor.com