VProtect

Do we have, or stand any chance of getting, the sources to VProtect?

I was booting RO5/RPCEmu in order to take some screenshots, and I noted with some irony that our anti-virus “protection” is now a DECADE old!

This might become more pertinant as and when RISC OS starts seeing action on RPis – you know some people will be jerks…

Best wishes,

Rick.

You could ask Alan Glover at Pineapple, since it was theirs. Also note that the source to Slayer is available (but not pretty).

But is there actually any point? Any RISC OS viruses that are still about are probably 26 bit and not StrongARM safe, let alone ARMv7. Unless they were written in BASIC.

What would a RISC OS virus checker do, exactly?

Do we have, or stand any chance of getting, the sources to VProtect

If the sources were published, evil virus writers could inspect it and write something which sidestepped the detection…

VProtect was the detection half, and you were supposed to buy the clean up half from Pineapple. Since you can’t buy it anymore it does make VProtect look like boot sequence clutter!

I’m fairly certain our version of VProtect is broken, at least when it comes to scanning the module chain on startup. Or at least it dies horribly if I’m running with high processor vectors (IIRC it accidentally calls OS_Module 1 instead of OS_Module 12, causing a crash deep inside FileSwitch due to the duff filename pointer pointing to unmapped memory, instead of pointing to zero page like it would on a regular OS build. But I haven’t checked yet whether the accidental reason code mixup goes away with regular OS builds. See here for a bit more info.)