Thread: Viruses for everyone infections through the web

In the pre-Internet era it wasn't easy for virus writers to circulate their creations, since floppy disks were the only widespread means of transmission. The golden age for crooks dawned with the emergence of the Internet. Now they could send their viruses anywhere in the world from their own homes-all that was needed was a web connection. The Internet also introduced antivirus manufacturers to a new problem-until then, experts had studied every virus individually and come up with individual tools to deal with them. Three hundred viruses per day were not too much of a burden, but the number quickly rose to more than 35,000 per day.

As a result, the antivirus vendors had to build large computer centers and write tools that automatically analyze virus samples to determine their signatures. Today, such analysis takes a couple of seconds-only in difficult cases do the experts personally examine any data.



In recent times, it is not just PCs but also cellphones that have been affected by virus attacks. Thankfully, only a limited number of such threats have surfaced so far, but that could change in the near future with the advent of synchronization services such as Microsoft LiveMesh and Apple MobileMe, which constantly exchange and update data between cell phones and computers. These serve as the perfect distribution method for the viruses-there is no real protection against such attacks yet. Even Fred Cohen concluded in his thesis that a computer can be safe only if it is completely isolated from contact with any other computer. That means it cannot be networked or allow any foreign storage medium to be connected.

Today, this is just not practical. There is nothing we can do but be careful and trust the antivirus industry, which in turn has to continuously react to new types of threats and provide users with tools to keep us on top of the daily cat-and mouse game we face.