Anti-Virus White Papers

Fighting Computer Viruses

• Tags:
• anti-virus,
• viruses,
• host,
• spread

Overview Computer viruses have pervaded popular culture at least as successfully as they have the world's computer population. Capitalizing on the same fearful fascination with man-made life-forms that Mary Shelley tapped in Frankenstein, viruses have become the subject of widespread urban legends and hoaxes, popular television shows and movies. Yet they have not received much scientific scrutiny. Much of their popular presence is attributable to an obvious but deep biological analogy: computer viruses replicate by attaching themselves to a host (a program or computer instead of a biological cell) and co-opting the host's resources to make copies of themselves. Symptoms can range from unpleasant to fatal. Computer viruses spread from program to program and computer to computer, much as biological viruses spread within individuals and among individual members of a society. There are other computer pathogens, such as the "worms" that occasionally afflict networks and the "Trojan horses" that put a deceptively friendly face on malicious programs, but viruses are the most common computer ill by far. We and our colleagues at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center have found the biological analogy to be helpful in understanding the propagation of computer viruses on a global scale and inspirational in our development of defenses against them. Furthermore, we have also drawn inspiration for defenses against pathological software from the vertebrate immune system and its astounding ability to repel or destroy pathogens.

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