Abstract

According to Jeffrey Kephardt from Scientific Journal, “ Computer viruses replicate by attaching themselves to a host (a program or computer instead of a biological cell) and co-opting the host’s resources to make copies of themselves” (www.sciam.com, Nov 97). Viruses can infect over 1 million computers in a short period of time because of the ease of transport. In 1987, a DOS virus, called "The Brain", infected the boot sectors of floppy diskettes. It became obsolete when the PC industry invented systems that booted from hard disks. In 1989, "The Stone Virus", which infected the boot sector of the hard disks, surfaced. Several other viruses surfaced and underwent the birth rate and death rate cycle. The birth rate refers to the creation and spread of the virus and the death rate refers to the decline and curtailment of the virus.

There are 3 classes of PC viruses: file infectors, boot-sector infectors, and macro viruses. 85 percent of all known viruses are file infectors, according Gregory Sorkin from Scientific American. Once the application is run, the virus executes and attaches to the computer's memory so it can infect other applications. Boot sector infectors account for 5 percent of all known viruses. The viruses execute when the computer boots because memory reads them from the hard disks or diskettes. Macro viruses are the most rapidly spread viruses because they attach themselves to the scripts embedded in a document.

Gordon from IBM identifies 4 categories of virus writers: the adolescent, the college student, the adult, and the ex-virus writer. He explained that the college student and the adolescent are morally and ethically sound; however, they see no correlation between their virus and its effects. The adult, though small in comparison, does not value ethics and will only stop writing viruses if the punishment is severe. The ex-virus writer, bored and preoccupied with other hobbies, no longer writes viruses but was uncertain whether virus writing should be illegal.

McAfee, an anti-virus company, advises users to verify and authenticate the sender of e-mails and not to open any attachments if they do not recognize the identity of the source. They also advise to disregard and delete junk e-mails and to virus check any files prior to downloading them.

Antivirus technology fall into two categories: generic and scanning. Generic programs were designed to monitor and detect behavior consistent with a virus; however, it could not differentiate an actual virus from file behaving like a virus. Scanning programs monitor and curtail the effect of viruses because it understood the difference between an actual virus and a file behaving like a virus. It also searched files, boot records, and memory for any pattern indicative of a virus. Antivirus technology is now automated and more effective. Programmers have developed more sophisticated means of detecting viruses. Among them is the use of DNA of viruses as well as the extraction of high-quality signatures through the measurement of the frequencies of the short byte sequences. Programmers are also exploring how they can strengthen the use of cryptography to render systems impenetrable.