Anti-virus researchers don't usually share viruses with people they can't trust. Pro-virus types are often unresponsive to freeloaders. And why would you *trust* someone who's prepared to mail you a virus, bona-fide or otherwise? [A high percentage of the 'viruses' available over the internet are non-replicating junk.] Requests for viruses by people 'writing a new anti-virus utility' are usually not taken too seriously. * We get rather a lot of such requests, which leads to a certain amount of cynicism. * Writing a utility to detect a single virus is one thing: writing a usable, stable, reasonably fast scanner which detects all known viruses is a considerable undertaking. There are highly experienced and qualified people working more or less full time on adding routines to do this to antivirus packages which are already mature, and unless you have a distinctly novel approach, you don't have much chance of keeping up with them. * It may be that the research you're interested in has already been done. Say what sort of information you're looking for, and someone may be able to help. * You can't afford to use junk 'viruses' for research, and the best collections are largely in the hands of people who won't allow access to them to anyone without cast-iron credentials. If you want to test anti-virus software with live viruses, this is *not* the way to get good virus samples. Valid testing of antivirus software requires a lot of time, care and thought and a valid virus test-set. Virus simulators are unhelpful in this context: a scanner which reports a virus when it finds one of these is actually false-alarming, which isn't necessarily what you want from a scanner. Read Vesselin Bontchev's paper on maintaining a virus library:
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