20th Anniversary Of Computer Viruses Commemorated 260
DoraLives writes "Our good friends at the BBC are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the computer virus. So, viruses are no longer teenagers and are now entering adulthood, as 'there are almost 60,000 viruses in existence and they have gone from being a nuisance to a permanent menace.' What wonders shall there be to come, as these marvelous bits of code continue to grow and multiply?" We ran a recent BBC-authored story on the psychology of virus writers.
"Celebrate"? (Score:4, Insightful)
What wonders shall there be to come (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:thank you, thank you.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:One more year and... (Score:2, Insightful)
It represents a full generation. e.g. One cadre of people have grown up for their whole lives in contact with both the realities of the thing and the meme.
This might inicate both better virus and better defenses.
It also might just be a slow day for the news.
Viruses signal the organic nature of the net (Score:5, Insightful)
Viruses, worms, trojans are way past the point of being expressions of individualistic derangement.
They represent the nasty side of the biology of the Net: the fact that any simulated or real ecosystem produces more parasites than non-parasites, and that non-parasites have to spend a significant amount of energy fighting off the bugs.
Two decades is not significant in itself, but it should be a stark warning that viruses are not going to go away, that the Net is turning "wild", and that we need something other than daily antivirus updates to keep our systems safe.
Journalists (Score:5, Insightful)
"there are almost 60,000 viruses in existence"
Why do journalists insist on sticking poorly researched figures in a writeup? Do they think that this somehow makes it all seem more credible? This number is clearly just a count from a virus checker's definition file summary. I bet they failed to include or even comprehend the fact that viruses are not a Windows only thing - heck, game instructions for the Amiga would insist that you hard booted your machine to get rid of potentially evil RAM content type stuff.
Re:Scary (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:XBox viruses? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:"Celebrate"? (Score:5, Insightful)
today, the viruses are copycats or from virus kits or just plain wannabe's writing junk that happens to work and take advantage of huge holes.
I suggest you actually learn about these buggers, they are absolutely facinating and the early ones are just plain old damned impressive.
It's like the old Demo scene... amazing things with tiny bits of code.
Simple: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's also not much to gain since Joe Home User won't be putting anything on the X-Box that JSK would want.
The virus would also have to wedge itself permanently into the system. Otherwise a simple press of the reset button and *poof* cured.
What do you do when your gaming system acts up?
Reset. Console don't get viruses because it's (virtually) impossible by design to make any permanent effects. All Nintendo systems are immune because the system doesn't depend on writable media. Worst that could happen is that your memory card gets fried. But that doesn't affect any of your games or the system itself.
Ben
Re:thank you, thank you.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:thank you, thank you.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got a great counter-example for that. Microsoft's IIS web server runs about 20% of all web sites, while Apache runs 70%. By your logic, Apache should be the server everyone attacks.
I've been running a copy of the Apache web server on my home computer for the last three months. During that time, I've logged 22,000 attacks on my server. And every last one of those was attacking it as if it were IIS.
Why wait? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Almost" an accurate article (Score:2, Insightful)
Is anybody else bothered by this statement? "Almost every year"? I can certainly find hundreds of examples for each year.
Re:Wait a year. (Score:2, Insightful)