Anti-Hacking White Papers
The Future of Viruses on the Internet
Overview
At present, computer viruses are a constant low-level annoyance. Every company knows that it ought to have anti-virus software, and that virus protection is a cost of doing business, just like backup and fire insurance. Small virus incidents are common and routine. In organizations that do centralized incident management and reporting and have anti-virus software well deployed, most incidents involve only one or two systems; the virus is caught before it can spread farther than that.
When new viruses are discovered, anti-virus software is updated to deal with them on a cycle of weeks or months. Anti-virus vendors generally offer monthly updates, and in a typical corporate environment new updates are installed every one to six months. Because it takes a typical new virus many months, or even a few years, to become widespread, this is reasonable. The recent rise of macro viruses, which can become widespread in just a few months, has put some downward pressure on these time-scales, but not changed their general magnitude. It is still feasible to deal with new viruses through a largely manual process: a customer finding a new virus sends it in to a vendor, the vendor analyses it by hand and returns detection and repair information to the customer, and other customers get the information over the next months, in their regular updates.
| Publisher | IBM | File Format | HTML |
|---|---|---|---|
| Date Published | August 2003 | ||
| Format | White Papers | ||
| Topics | |||
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