Does the file name affect antivirus false positives [closed] - antivirus

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I am appending my installer name with the version number, as in "progname_setup_1.1.5678.9101.exe". I like it because it makes it easy for me to track and for the user to identify it from prior downloads. This is an Inno Setup build of .net. And it is signed (if that matters).
That means the file name will change with each update. Will this practice increase the chances of false positive flags by antivirus software. If I kept the same file name (e.g., progname_setup.exe), perhaps the file would get a chance to build a reputation, even though version numbers would change inside. Or maybe antivirus doesn't work like that at all.
So, what is the best approach for file naming regarding antivirus: progname_setup_1.1.5678.9101.exe, progname_setup.exe, or it doesn't matter?

I really can't speak for "all" anti virus engines but the good ones really don't use the file name as an indicator of anything because it's just too unreliable. Think about it, if an AV definition file said, "FOO.EXE == Malicious Virus" all the malware writer would have to do is constantly change the file name.
AV engines, at least the good ones, work by looking for bit patterns inside the body of the file; usually specific bit patterns that can exist anywhere in the file. Now, you don't have to take my word for it, check out the CLAMAv signature database docs and you will see that "file name" or any other file metadata (like size, perms, etc) are not even something you can specify in a signature.
https://github.com/vrtadmin/clamav-devel/blob/master/docs/signatures.pdf
You can also run your samples via scanii's web scanning tool https://scanii.com/free-virus-scan/ if you would like to be certain that they should not trigger a false positive - disclaimer scanii is my pet project.

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How to overcome gzip/Mavericks incompatibility? [closed]

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So I recently changed jobs and I brought a bunch of files with me off my OS X 10.7 system. I had way too many files than could fit on the external drive I had, so I had tried dragging select files onto the drive, which gave me eventual repeated errors, so instead I used:
tar -zcvf whatever.tar.gz my_files
and then dragged the gzipped tarball onto the drive and that worked just fine. Now however, on my new Mavericks 10.9 system, I just tried to open a rich text file (that I'd created in Text Edit on 10.7) and I get the error:
'The document "_lab_notebook_2.rtf" could not be opened.'
I called Apple about this and they claimed that gzip was adding "the command line" to the metadata of the file (I assume the rich text file - though I could be wrong) and that metadata chunk is incompatible with Text Edit in Mavericks. They said that they have a request in with the gzip developers to address this issue (by stripping out the added metadata at some point along the way). Eventually, they say once that is updated, it will be in a new system update.
In the meantime, I'm stuck with a file that Text Edit can't open. I can open the file in other text editors, but I really would rather use Apple's Text Edit, hence this post. I tried opening a copy of the file with Rezilla and I can see the metadata in coded form, but nothing's jumping out at me as the offending data. I even tried removing each resource 1 by 1 and trying to open the file after each removal, but it still would not open.
Does anyone have any hints as to how to strip out whatever it is that gzip added? Am I even working from the correct starting point? They said that the data was added during the zip-up of the file, and I no longer have access to the original. Should I be working with the .tar.gz file or the .rtf file that was contained there-in?
Thanks,
Rob
The file you are trying to open, _lab_notebook_2.rtf might not be the file. (Are you sure it doesn't have a dot before the underscore, i.e. ._lab_notebook_2.rtf?) It may be the resource fork of the actual file, where the actual file would be named lab_notebook_2.rtf.
I don't know who you talked to at Apple, but gzip doesn't add anything to anything. It is simply a lossless compression and decompression utility. They certainly haven't contacted me about it (I am one of the gzip developers). Please look up my contact information, e.g on zlib.net, and copy that email to me. Thanks.
tar on the other hand may not be preserving all of the information that was on the original file system, or storing resource forks as ._ files, depending on what you asked it to do. It would have been better if you had used the Finder File:Compress operation, which preserves all of that information. (Or on the command line, the ditto utility with the options noted in its man page to duplicate what Finder does.)

Perl documentation (POD) browsers? [closed]

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I'm looking for is a good on-screen POD reading experience.
For years, I've used perldoc or man running in an xterm to read Perl documentation on screen, and a small custom program built around Pod::LaTeX to print it. The printed version is good: the script does a nice job. However, on-screen reading is painful:
You can search, but good luck finding e.g., the as section in DBIx::Class::ResultSet. Less doesn't know anything about the structure of the document, and searches for common English words are pointless.
I fear every time the document tells me see section so-and-so. Great. Now I have to find that. And then getting back to where I was won't be trivial (though that may be my less ignorance showing)
See document so-and-so is worse. !perldoc foo works, but switching between the two documents is then hard. You can mostly get around this by suspending less and running perldoc from the shell, but that's more keystrokes and I'm lazy.
Formatting leaves a lot to be desired.
I want to be able to click a table of contents, and go to that section. I want to be able to click that "see other" and go there. And so on. So far, I know of two possibilities:
search.cpan.org, example DBIx::Class::ResultSet. Requires an Internet connection, but that's not normally a problem.
Podbrowser. Just started trying this, looks pretty nice.
I'm running Debian GNU/Linux, both Lenny and Squeeze. But please suggest programs for all platforms to make this as useful as possible.
You can try Pod::Browser which is built-in http server that you can connect to with your browser, or something like Tk::Pod which is gui pod browser.
Have you seen CPAN::Mini::Webserver or Pod::POM::Web or Apache::Perldoc? These set up a local way for you to see nice, HTML versions of your docs.
I would recomment converting all your POD to HTML using pod2html
This makes it browsable, linked and nice looking, and you can customize look&feel via css.
Just to add two more POD servers that seemed to have been missed thus far!
Pod::Server
Pod::Webserver
Have a look also at Gtk2::Ex::PodViewer that is an excellent GUI viewer based on GTK. If you are using also Windows you can find a prebuilt wrapper in Camelbox (http://code.google.com/p/camelbox/).

What are the most common virus file types currently circulating? [closed]

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I am working on a project that will involve file upload to a server. I am interested in understanding what kinds of files virus writers currently tend to target. I am aware of the following threads:
How would you programmatically test a file for viruses ?
ensuring uploaded files are safe
How can I determine a file’s true extension/type programatically?
Server side virus scanning
But am interested in general in finding out about common attack vectors.
All of them. There aren't any "safe" file types when a JPG image can infect you with a virus and you can even trick the browser to execute JavaScript in any file no matter its declared type.
But the biggest and most widespread danger doesn't even involve uploaded files - ANY text that is entered by users and displayed on your page is a potential vector of Cross-Site-Scripting attacks.
I ran an "upload file" form for a little while and a few things I found:
All sorts of PHP scripts (shells, redirects, various "owned by $LAMER", you name it)
I think I had a few browser exploits (.html, .jpgs)
A bunch of files with the wrong extensions (ie, PHP scripts with the extension .rar, hoping that the server's mime-type guesser did the wrong thing)
Zip files full of all of the above
Anyway, those are just a few things I found. Hope they are helpful.
.exe and .scr are most common filetypes. Also, there are "tricks" with double extensions like readme.txt.scr or readme.doc.exe
exe is probably the most common

How to compare two word documents? [closed]

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Businesses Analyst from my team keeps sending us the updated Requirements documents often and I end up hunting the recent changes by comparing the old version. Is their a good way of comparing the Word documents?
Note: We have the track changes option ON, but now the documents looks like a blood bath, complicating it much more :(
Use this option in Word 2003:
Tools | Compare and Merge Documents
Or this in Word 2007:
Review | Compare
It prompts you for a file with which to compare the file you're editing.
I use TortoiseMerge with the xdocdiff plugin to compare Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF versioned files
If you have Beyond Compare, you can diff two word documents with the help of some rules that you have to download from the developer's site and plugin. It'll then give you a text-only (without formatting) view (with some word format-gibberish that you can ignore. The differences will be highlighted and easy to find.
I made a note on how to do it here. It talks about Excel but there is a rule for Word in the same place.
If you don't have Beyond Compare... buy it! Highly recommended.. I'd struggle without it.
Codejacked covers three different methods on how to compare word documents.
You're using the wrong tools. Through the course of my last major project, we managed to convince the entire team to move to a Wiki scheme. Not only did it make tracking changes faster and easier, but it helped organize the information better. Rather than having to keep track of arbitrary indexes in a large text document, hyperlinks were available between documents.
This meant that the documents could naturally flow from high-level to specifics. Implementation of such specs was incredibly easy in comparison to Word docs. Also, the fact that the docs were in a central location ensured that no one was still working from an out of date copy they saved to their hard drive.
I know there can be some internal resistance to moving in new directions. But if you can convince your colleagues that they should be forward thinking and always challenging themselves, they'll give it a shot and become true believers in no time flat. :-)
Near the "track changes" stuff there is also an option to compare documents, I believe.
Attorneys use programs such as Comparewrite and DeltaView as we are comparing documents daily. We call it "blacklining" a document because the differences show up in bold underline for additions and black strike-through for deletions.
Open any of the documents and use the Review>Compare tab.
I don't know how to compare the files individually, since they are binary, but how about making a program that talks to MS Word, copying the contents of the files to a pure-text file? Then you could compare the plain-text files.
If the formatting is basic, one option is to use a tool that dumps the doc to a plain text file, and then use diff as you would on any other.
Versionate might do the trick.
The document comparison features in Word 2003 are extremely poor, and often results in the user removing parts of documents they did not want too
The only rational choice is to use other software. There are a multitude of text comparing software in the marketplace, but to do this within Word, the simplest answer is to upgrade to Word 2007 or later versions
From Word version 2007 the ribbon command "Review" and "Compare" are easy to find, and operate reasonably obviously. And they have a nice clear layout of merged changes, and the before and after docs
The small cost of the upgrade will be well worth considering the time you will waste in 2003 compare, and the potential damage to your documents it could cause
Any suggestions by others that you can use the compare features in 2003 is mischievous, and has not well thought through given the long term consequences of parts of your documents being silently deleted

What's the best way of diffing Crystal Reports? [closed]

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If you have two versions of the same report (.rpt) and you want to establish what the exact differences are, what is the best way to go about this? I've seen some commercial tools to do this, but I'm not too interested in forking out cash for something that should be relatively straight forward. Can I hook into the Crystal API and simply list all of the properties of every field or something? Please someone tell me that there's an Open Source project somewhere that does this... #:-)
#Kogus, wouldn't diffing the outputs as text hide any formatting differences?
#ladoucep, I don't seem to be able to export the report without data.
Can I hook into the Crystal API and
simply list all of the properties of
every field or something? Please
someone tell me that there's an Open
Source project somewhere that does
this... #:-)
There is in fact, such an API. I wrote a VB6 application to do just what you asked and more. I think I even migrated it to VB.Net. As it was for my own use, I didn't spend much time making it 'polished'. I've been intending to release it, but I haven't had the time...
Another approach that I've used in the past is to create an Access application to help manage large, report-development projects. One of it's many features includes the ability to extract the tables that are used by the report, and the SQL statements used by its Commands and SQL Expressions. It's intent is to give one a global perspective of which reports use which tables. I probably still have it somewhere...
** edit 1 **
BusinessObjects Enterprise XI (R?) has a feature named 'Meta Manager'. It will periodically examine the contents of the Repository and save the results to a database. It uses the Report-Application Service (RAS) to generate the meta data. It's an additional, 5-figure license, of course.
** edit 2 **
Consider using PowerShell to do the work: PsCrystal.
One helpful technique is to output both versions of the report to plain text, then diff those outputs.
You could write something using the crystal report component to describe every property of the report, like you described. Then you could output that to text, and diff those. I'm not aware of any open source tool that does it for you, but it would not be terribly hard to write it.
#question in the post:
Diffing the outputs would only show formatting changes if the relative positions had changed. For example, if i had this:
before:
First name, last name, addresss
after:
Last Name, First Name, Address
Then that would show up as a difference.
But if I had just bumped the address column over a few pixels, or changed it from plain text to bold, then you are right, that would not show up.
One technique I have used to great effect in the past is to print out reports from both versions based on the same data. I then take the first page from each version, lay one on top of the other (it is important not to mix them up) and hold them up to a window. It is generally quite easy to see any differences, and these differences can be manually annotated with a suitable writing instrument such as a pencil. Repeat for each page in the report.
Admittedly, for large reports this can be quite time consuming and error prone, but these limitataions can be overcome with patience and care.