BleepingComputer.com: Where can I intentionally infect myself with Zero.Access?

Hi all,

I'm looking to infect the heck out of a virtual machine to practice virus removal, and I'm specifically looking for a place to acquire ZeroAccess from. Is there a website or place I can go to download and unleash the dogs of war? Or do I have to drive around keygen sites until I get lucky? Thanks in advance!

This post has been edited by Orange Blossom: 30 November 2011 - 03:26 AM
Reason for edit: Moved to more appropriate forum. ~ OB

Option II..
Warez and crack sites are a good source and should only be used from a virtual machine. That's the best information and most specific information we can provide.

Check your PM

I have send you the link

Enjoy malware analysis

One of the primary goals of Bleeping Computer is to assist victims of infection with removal and to prevent the spread of malware, not encourage them. Therefore, we will not provide active links to malicious sites where infections can be contracted and spread. Additionally, others reading this topic may use the information for nefarious purposes or an unwitting novice user may accidentally click a link and end up infecting their computer.

For those and other obvious reasons, we are not going to provide specific information in a public forum. However, you can perform a Google search on "how to infect your computer on purpose" which will provide information such as this article.

You can also read this topic which explains the most common ways malware is contracted and identifies the types of sites where you can easily get infected by not following the advice provided to protect yourself.

WARNING: Some infections can cause so much damage to your system that they cannot be successfully cleaned or repaired. In those cases you may have no option but to reformat, and perform a clean install of the OS.

Garby, on 28 November 2011 - 08:25 PM, said:

You should know that not all malware will work in a VM. There is quite some malware in the wild that tries to detect if it is running in a VM or not, and if it is, it changes it behavior. Most of the time this behavior change is just to stop running: it will not infect the OS runnin inside a VM.
We assume that malware authors do this to make analysis more difficult: many malware researchers use VMs to analyze software.
The most popular VM detected by malware is VMware.

So don't be surprised if some of the malware you are testing doesn't work in your VM, i.e. it doesn't infect your VM.

I got zero.access, several trojans and two fake antiviruses just from clicking on the wrong couple of links in my email spam folder. I don't understand why you would have to go hunting for something to get infected.