DonationCoder.com Software > N.A.N.Y. 2010

NANY 2010 Teaser: Crush MCP (Master Control Program)

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Crush:
I noticed that my other project is not very interesting to others, so I decided to do something more useful.

The Master Control Program is a small tool running in the background that monitors all tasks and programs.
After making a snapshot of all running processes new ones will be terminated and tracked in a deletion list.
So you can see and get protected if a virus or other unknown programs are automatically starting in the background without your permission to raise your security while working.
I´m waiting for suggestions or features you´d like to see.

mouser:
This could be useful.. there are already some programs for this but i think there is always room for more that are nice and simple to use.

I see a couple of issues to think through:

* How do you add new applications to the list of allowed programs?
* If a virus only needs half a second to infect your computer -- you aren't really going to be able to stop it just by watching background process list -- for that you need an antivirus style hook that catches files before they can execute.
* But still it could be useful to alert you about new programs you've never seen before that are running.

mouser:
I think it might be nice just to have a program that made a list of the first time it saw any given program run for the first time and saved that to a nice text file, so i could always check that file and see when a new program was discovered running for the first time.  and maybe show in tray a balloon each time a new program was discovered running that had never been seen before.

Crush:
I also wanted to save the list to create a white- and blacklist. Perhaps a function to auto-google for killed or tracked processes would be cool.

mouser:
that's a nice idea.
one extra benefit of keeping this kind of list of history of when each program was run for the first time, is that it could be very helpful for diagnosing problems that you only notice a day later, etc.  and could help you diagnose a problem on a relative's computer.
note that for this kind of benefit, it doesnt have to ever kill anything.. it's just trying to track when a process first ran -- the nice part about that is how simple it would be to use, nothing to it.
maybe you could make it run two dif modes: 1) kill anything on blacklist but dont kill new programs; 2) kill everything not on whitelist
so if you only wanted to use it to keep track of the first time a program ever ran, you would just use mode 1.

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