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Delphinoy Unveils Big Plans

delphinoy — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:33:53 +0000

Today, Embarcadero unveils big plans for Delphi and here at Delphinoy.com, I am also unveiling big plans.

The last post of this site was January 26, 2010 exactly 8 months ago as of today. Delphinoy, yours truly, is busy with a lot of things in the past 8 months.

Some of the changes that I’m planning to implement are:

1. Post at least twice a week ( I hope) or at least regularly.

2. Post more technologies update.

3. Post some tips on Delphi. I know that there’s a lot of tips out there already but I’ll post only those that I’m using in my own projects.

4. Post other news on software development areas.

5. Create a separate page for job offerings.

Promote and generate more buzz to this site. Join me in this new phase of Delphinoy.

Embarcadero Unveils Big Plans for Delphi

Avast Had A Bad False Positive Issue On All Delphi Binaries

delphinoy — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 04:41:12 +0000

Avast, an antivirus software, started detecting all binaries created with Delphi as malware.

At first, it looked like just an isolated incident but according to Avast forum, they really had a bad false positive issue today. Admittedly, they reported that this incident does not only affects Delphi binaries but Avast started flagging hundreds of innocent files as a “Win32:Delf-MZG” Trojan. The files affected were high-profile programs produced by Adobe, Realtek sound card drivers, various media players among others.

The errant update had been issued around 12:15 a.m. GMT. A new update was issued at 5:50 a.m. GMT that corrected the problem.

A step-by-step guide on how to restore the files from the Virus Chest can be found here: http://support.avast.com/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=376

Warning: New Virus Infects Programs Built With Delphi

delphinoy — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:06:11 +0000

A relatively new mild virus is spreading around by infecting programs/software that were developed in Delphi. According to anti-virus vendor BitDefender, the virus “spreads by infecting systems that have the Delphi compiler from version 4 up to 7.0 installed.”

Sophos, the company that first discovered the virus “W32/Induc-A” stated that this virus “searches computers for installations of Delphi, then attempts to temporarily modify SysConst.pas, and compiles this to infect SysConst.dcu. The original SysConst.dcu can be restored from the backup made by the virus in SysConst.bak.”

Michael Swindell, VP of products at Embarcadero, responded when he learned about the virus affecting Delphi IDEs:

This is just another way for a virus to infect executable code. It makes it sound like Delphi or IDEs are now “vulnerable,” but they are no more or less vulnerable than any other of the thousands of EXEs and DLLs on every developers machine, and no more or less than they have been since viruses and trojans were first created. This is a clever trick, but it’s nothing to be more worried about than all of the other ways your dev machine can be attacked. Use virus scanners and keep them up to date.” http://sdtimes.com/blog/1508

Instructions for Removing the Virus:

By default, most anti-virus software do not scan .DCU (delphi compiled unit) and .pas (pascal unit) file extensions, so you need to turn on the option to scan all file extensions and do a full system scan. If the anti-virus detected the virus, replace the .dcu and .pas from a clean backup files.

It’s also a must to recompile all software from a cleaned Delphi and replaced the infected compiled executables.