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20 Years of Virii
DenOfEarth writes "News.com has an article outlining that it was around twenty years ago that a computer security reasearcher coined the term 'virus', and how the things have been running amok. Interestingly enough, when said researcher applyed for research funding to look into a blanket solution to this possible 'virus' problem, he was turned down."
Virii is not a word.
Drive safely.
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.
Remote exploits on unpatched machines go back quite a while too, at least to 1988 (the Morris worm).
As long as there are security holes in programs that interface with the network (such as sendmail), people will try to use them for malicious (or at least non-beneficial) purposes.
In English, AFAIK, the plural of a word ending with 's' is 'ses'. Hence virus -> viruses.
'virii' does bear some resemblance to _Latin_ plurals. For example, the plural of 'radius' is 'radii' which is a Latin plural, but used in English as well. Note that here 'us' changes into 'i', which is why you might argue that virus -> viri (single 'i' at the end).
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
There is one solution to the 'virus' problem that everyone in the networking and security field knows about, but which few professionals endorse due to conflicts with business and commerce.
The solution to 'viruses' is diversity in systems. This stems from the biological viewpoint which makes us realize that while one type of system may be vulnerable to a specific flaw, a mix of different systems (each with their own properties) will offer greater resilience.
Think of the Internet, and how much trouble has been caused by Microsoft Windows viruses. Because of the Microsoft monoculture, the Internet has come to the brink of disaster several times (worm outbreaks; flooding of DNS root servers; and most notably, spam and increasingly fragmented global communications as a result).
Any time you read an article and see Fred Cohen's name, you can stop reading right there, because you know another so called "journalist" has fallen hook, line, and sinker for this guy's self-aggrandizing line of bullshit.
I'm calling you on this one. I've been reading quite a few books on viruses, and I've read Cohen's paper from 1984 on viruses, and his A Short Course on Computer Viruses. Both are _very_ informative. The paper from 1984 described experiments back in the day when people would say that there system is absolutely secure, no way to doo anything to it, period (people still say it, but back then, others believed them.) His Course on Viruses is also excellent - it has a very concise set-theoretic basis for viruses. He may very well be whoring for his security company (I wouldn't know), but don't doubt this man's ability to write concise, accurate, funny texts on the subject.
This statement is false.