A Matter of Viruses

There's more innovation coming from today's virus writers than from the big software companes whose core goals are to progress and innovate.

Uh-oh.

The bad news above and below is from an editorial by Kelly Martin at SecurityFocus.com . . .

Viruses grew by over 25% in 2004. We're at about 115,000 viruses today, and the virus variants and mutations continue to grow in record numbers. One might venture to forecast, using current trends, that we'll have 150,000 Windows viruses by the end of 2005, although it's anyone's guess. Look for anti-virus vendors starting to deliver definition updates every day, or even twice a day. Are we ever going to find a solution to the virus problem?

Uh-oh.

If computer viruses are that much of a problem -- and they are a serious and rapidly growing problem -- imagine the havoc a hacker could wreak with a molecular manufacturing program.

Martin says viruses "are costing us billions of dollars in lost productivity and actual damages." How much greater and more costly will the damage be from illicitly programmed matter?

The editorial doesn't provide any easy remedy to the existing computer virus problem. Nor can CRN provide any simple solutions to the near-future MM security problem. But if we think we've got troubles today, things could get a lot worse soon unless we can come up with some very innovative answers.

Mike Treder

Comments

[Mr. Farlops]

I hate to say it because, I hate spam, phishing, trojans, etc. as much as the next person but, maybe it's good we're getting swamped with all this stuff now.

Think of it as training for the future. Once the social, political and technical solutions to Internet parasites and criminals are in place, we'll have the experience to deal with similar problems in the future when nanotech matures.

But I also think our current irritations are indicative of the future as well. Our current troubles in computer security show that we can never have 100% safety. I think that some nano-crime and nano-terrorism may be unavoidable but, these events won't be fatal for our species.

[Tom Craver]

Just a data point: new x86 processors are getting an "NX" (no-execute) bit that will help some, for a little while at least. It'll make it more difficult to introduce a virus into a system without user assistance. Windows has some support now, and presumably will support it more in the future.

There are other, more effective approaches that processor and OS companies may implement once they realize that the NX bit is just viewed as an interesting challenge by the virus writers.

I agree, we'll learn much from our software experience that will help with nanofactory design viruses and such.

[Brett Bellmore]

I think the techniques needed are out there. OS writers just aren't ready, yet, to take the performance hit necessary to pull it off. And I mean performance hit, not in terms of speed, but in terms of features.