20th Anniversary Of Computer Viruses Commemorated

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.

Comments

"Celebrate"?

[ummit]

Maybe I'm just a grumpy old curmudgeon, but I don't see what there is to celebrate here, or what is about these little bits of code that's so "marvelous".

Re:"Celebrate"?

[Lumpy]

Most of these viruses, espically the early ones were examples of expert coding. Extremely clever viruses that were unbelieveably tiny and worked well, taking them apart tought you alot about the sheer genius behind them.

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.

What wonders shall there be to come

[bigberk]

Just you wait, there's more in store. Except it seems now that virus authors have major financial backing (spammers) and are establishing a sophisticated zombie infrastructure running on Windows machines that will cause years of serious trouble. Time to start seriously prosecuting these a$$holes (spammers, virus authors, or Microsoft... you decide!)

Viruses signal the organic nature of the net

[heironymouscoward]

Put enough people into a system and it starts to behave like an organic system rather than individuals each doing their thing.

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

[Doomrat]

"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:XBox viruses?

[Jeedo]

Yes, unlike windows it doesnt have any ports open by default.

Re:thank you, thank you..

[Carnildo]

Blaming it on Microsoft is foolish. There are exploits in every OS out there. People write for MS because it's what people use.

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.