About

The Virus Encyclopedia is an Internet encyclopedia about viruses, worms and other self-spreading programs. It is a Wiki, which means you can edit it, and we encourage any potentially meaningful contributions. Under new management since 2006 November, and with a new host since 2012 June, this wiki is beginning to become a popular resource for information on Self-Replicating Programs (SRP's) for security professionals, hackers and the curious.

Mission Statement

The goal of the '''Virus Encyclopedia''' is to gather all information possible about self-replicating programs. These can include viruses, worms and even artificial life programs (outside of simulations). Also featured will be the people who create such programs, methods used to create them and the things such a program uses to survive and spread. A secondary purpose for the existence of this wiki is to clear up the confusion regarding such terms as "virus", "worm", "hacker", "cracker" and other terms whose meanings in popular use have become corrupted and have changed so much as to be completely different or even opposite of their true and original meaning.

Although there are already several sites that do these things, there is not one that does all of them in one place. For any given virus or worm, one must go to (for example) Symantec's threat descriptions to get a good technical explanation of what it does, search a magazine or site like The Register to see what it has done to whom, then go to Vmyths.com to get information on any hype and hysteria surrounding it. As those three sources target slightly different audiences, their focus is on only one or a few aspects of the program or code.

We at the Virus Encyclopedia hope to put all possible information about a particular piece of code in one place (with credible sources cited, of course).

More to come here soon…

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 License