ABOUT

"It's like an anti-virus company, but without that fake "We're better than you" attitude." - Dave Aitel

Offensive Computing, LLC was formed by Danny Quist and others as a resource for the computer security community. The primary emphasis here is on malware collections and analysis for the purpose of improving people's abilities to defend their networks. There is a noticeable lack of public sources of malware and malware analysis available. Those that were available were either for sale or limited to a small number of users. We provide resources such as live copies of malicious software, md5sums to search on and analysis of the malware to the general public. Offensive Computing currently has the largest publicly available malware collection on the Internet.

This way users can match malware they find on a system and they can quickly identify it and know the best defense. By removing barriers to information we believe this will make the Internet a safer place.

Samples are acquired in various ways:

• User contributed
• Captured via mwcollectors and other honey pots
• Found via searches
• Discovered on compromised systems

This site does NOT encourage or condone the spreading or propagation of viruses or worms. Thats exactly what this site is designed to help defend against.

The intent of providing live copies of malware is so that the community can collaborate on identifying and analyzing them in order to develop snort signatures and other defenses.

We encourage submissions and volunteers. Check the contact page for more information.

Danny Quist:

Danny Quist is the CEO and founder of Offensive Computing, LLC. His research is in automated analysis methods for malware with software and hardware assisted techniques. He has written several defensive systems to mitigate virus attacks on networks and developed a generic network quarantine technology. He consults with both private and public sectors on system and network security. His interests include malware defense, reverse engineering, exploitation methods, virtual machines, and automatic classification systems. Danny holds a Ph.D. from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.

Danny is a former instructor at New Mexico Tech, and has delivered several colloquium talks at various institutes. He has presented at several industry conferences including Blackhat, RSA, Shmoocon, Vizsec, and Defcon.