Anti-Hacking White Papers
How Prevalent are Computer Viruses?
Overview We are interested in understanding the extent of the computer virus problem in the world today, with an eye towards being able to predict what it will be like in the future. We discuss in detail the sorts of questions that must be answered in order to form an accurate picture of the situation. One approach to collecting such data, taken by Dataquest and Certus, is to survey security experts responsible for many PCs within their organization. We recommend a number of improvements that can be made to such surveys, and present a different methodology for measuring various aspects of the computer virus problem which possesses some important advantages. We have studied a large, stable population of PC DOS users for the past several years, recording information about virus incidents as they occurred. While the number of viruses that have been written has increased dramatically, only a small fraction have been seen in real incidents. Of this fraction, just a few viruses account for most of the incidents. While the number of incidents caused by all viruses each quarter is increasing, its increase is not nearly as dramatic as some have predicted. Some viruses are responsible for more incidents than in the past, while others are stable or declining in number.
| Publisher | IBM | File Format | HTML |
|---|---|---|---|
| Date Published | August 2003 | Downloads | 3 |
| Format | White Papers | ||
| Topics | |||
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