Where to obtain a particular virus for debugging purposes? [closed]

Question

Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.

Closed 7 years ago.

Improve this question

This is a little bit of an awkward question, and possibly off-topic, but it is at the end of the day in order to help debug a software issue: how would one go about obtaining a particular virus for testing purposes?

We have been receiving reports of our software failing on certain machines, and we think we have (through research and deduction) identified the cause as being a varient of the TDSS/TLD3 rootkit family.

We need to determine if this is truly the case, and if so, we'd like to patch our code to remove the TDSS infection before executing our code. However, I can't find any way of actually obtaining a sample of TDSS to test out this theory on. Short of searching comments on file sharing sites for someone saying "beware, this file is infected with TDSS," I can't think of any other way of sampling the virus? Is there no database of old viruses for such purposes (similar to CDC's stockpile of old viruses for medical research purposes!)?

Again, I do realize this is not a "standard" StackOverflow question, but I figured I would post here in the hopes of someone having some insight to share on this matter.

Answer 1

Here is an in-depth article on TDSS by a security analyst: http://nobunkum.ru/analytics/en-tdss-analysis. You might want to contact the author.