This is a mostly harmless virus demo written in python3.
This is intended for educational purposes only to demonstrate virus spreading.
When ran the virus.notpy3 script WILL infect any .notpy3 files it can find in the current working directory. The .notpy3 extension is used to prevent this from being able to infect any actual python scripts. But still be careful.
If you run this script this script somewhere you shouldn't and/or modify this script and break something, we are NOT responsible.
When the virus.notpy3 script is ran it'll infect any other .notpy3 script(s) in the current working directory.
First the virus will open itself and read all lines which contain the phrase "#VCODE".
Then it'll iterate through each file contained within the current working directory. If a file does not have a .notpy3 extenion, it'll be ignored. If a file already contains the "#VCODE" phrase, it'll also be ignored. Otherwise the virus will read in the victim script, prepend both #!/usr/bin/python3 and the previously read "#VCODE" lines to the victim script, then write the result back to the victim script. At this point the victim script is now infected and if ran will try to repeat this same process when ran before executing its intended functionality.
Clone this repo somewhere and cd into it.
Give the foo.notpy3, bar.notpy3, baz.notpy3, and qux.notpy3 scripts a quick look. They should all look something like:
#!/usr/bin/python3
import sys
print("Hi, I am {}".format(sys.argv[0]))
If you run them they should print Hi, I am [script name].
Now to run the virus execute ./virus.notpy3 in this directory. It should print out a bunch of messages about infecting the other .notpy3 files.
After exectuing the virus, check all of the other .notpy3 files. They should now be infected and have the entire contents of virus.notpy3 prepended to them.
Now if you run any of them they'll try to find and infect other .notpy3 scripts as well.
You can try copying backup/foo.notpy3 to a.notpy3 (cp backup/foo.notpy3 a.notpy3). Now if you run any of the other scripts (e.g. ./foo.notpy3), a.notpy3 will become infected and have the virus prepended to it as well!
To quickly restore all of the non-virus .notpy3 scripts to their original states you can run the ./restore.sh script. This will copy the backup copies of all of the scripts in ./backup to the current directory.
If you've messed up the backups you can reset your copy of this repo using git reset --hard or you can grab the originals from https://github.com/UMDLARS/py-virus-demo/tree/main/backup