Computer Viruses Essay, Research Paper

The quote ?The only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a

lead-lined room with armed guards ? and even then I have my doubts.?(E.H.

Spafford) of this report will explain how computer viruses have affected on

society and the security of personal computers. There literally hundreds of

viruses circulating for personal computers and many anti-viral packages that

claim to remove the code from your computer. Some viruses are polymorphic; that

is, they change with each infection in an attempt to avoid detection by

anti-virus programs. As quickly as someone writes an anti-virus program, someone

else writes a new virus that hides more successfully than in the past. Do to the

harshness of some viruses; people have devised methods of detecting and removing

them. The anti-viral programs will scan the entire hard drive looking for

evidence that viruses may have infected it. These programs must be told very

specifically what to look for on the hard drive. There are two main methods of

detecting viruses on a computer. The first is to compare all of the viruses on

the hard disk to known types of viruses. While this method is very accurate, it

can be made totally useless when dealing with a new and previously unknown

virus. The other method is the way in which a common cloning virus adapts. All

that a cloning virus really does is look at what operations the computer is

executing and reacts and adapts to them by making more copies of it. This is the

serious mistake with cloning viruses: all the copies of itself look the same.

Basically all data in a computer is stored in a byte structure format. These

bytes, which are similar to symbols, occur in specific orders and lengths. Each

of the cloned viruses has the same order and length of the byte structure. All

that the anti-virus program has to do is scan the hard drive for byte structures

that are duplicated several times and delete them. This method is an excellent

way of dealing with the adaptive and reproducing format of cloning viruses. The

disadvantage is that it can produce a number of false alarms such as when a user

has two copies of the same file. Virus-specific detection and removal techniques

required detailed analysis of each new virus as it is discovered. Computer virus

experts must identify strange sequences of instructions that appear in the viral

code but not in normal programs. These experts develop cures to remove these

viruses from any infected hosts. While there are thousands of DOS viruses, less

than 10% of them have been seen in actual virus incidents within the population

that companies monitor. These are the viruses that actually constitute a problem

for the general population of PC users. It is very important that anti-virus

software detect viruses that have been observed ?in the wild?. The remainder

are rarely seen outside of the collections of anti-virus groups like IBM.

Although many of them might never spread significantly, viruses that are not

prevalent remain of interest to the anti-virus society. Companies must always be

prepared for the possibility that a low-profile virus will start to become

prevalent. This requires them to be familiar with all viruses, prevalent or not,

and to incorporate a knowledge of as many of them as possible into anti-virus

software. It is not only the destructive nature of computer viruses that make

them so dangerous in today?s society in the business sector, but also their

ability to relate themselves to their surroundings and react in ways that allow

them to proceed undetected to wreck more havoc on personal computer users across

the world. Conclusion Viruses have been around quite some time now and I can

assure you that it will be around just about forever. Over a decade now, there

are people who are constantly coming up with new ways of making life in the

computer world very difficult. The trend of technology is changing so rapidly

that something such as viruses will also follow the trend. Therefore, what we

all should realize that the activity that goes on and how we can base the

information provided to help prevent the spread of virus activity in the future.

1. JEFFREY O. KEPHART, GREGORY B. SORKIN, DAVID M. CHESS and STEVE R. WHITE.

?Fighting Computer viruses? www.sciam.com/1197issue/1197kephart.html 2.

Steve R. White, Jeff Kephart, David M. Chess, ?Computer Viruses: A Global

Perspective? www.av.ibm.com/PapersFrame/papersframe.html 3. Suguitan. G,

?Fighting Computer viruses? www.soc.hawaii.edu/leonj/409bs98/suguitan/report1.

4. Solomon, Dr. Alan. ?A future impact to Viruses.? www.drsolomon.com/vircen/vanalyse/future.cfm

5. Tippett, Peter S. ?Alive!? www.bocklabs.wisc.edu/~janda/alive10.html.

1995.