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Are all viruses harmful?
Not all viruses are harmful. An e-mail virus that seeks out images
of child pornography on systems running Microsoft Windows and alerts
government agencies to positive findings, has been released by hackers
intent on cleaning up the Internet, ZDNet reports. Symantec has
confirmed findings in the wild.
The worm arrives as a form of a mail attachment and once the users
opens the mail attachment, a virus would be executed to search the
user's hard drive for child pornography pictures. The worm dubbed
"Noped", encrypted as Visual Basic Script (VBS) code is
useful for detecting users who have procession of child pornography.
Police inspector Terry Jones, of Manchester Police's Obscene Publications
Unit, has confirmed that British police departments will not be
responding to the worm alerts, as the reports would fail to meet
evidence standards. "This is not an approach that we would
advocate, as child pornography is a delicate area to investigate,
and we must have reasonable cause to suspect our evidence has been
gathered ethically."
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