The Beginning of Virus Protection

In early 1980's, virus protection was a simple task. Viruses were few and far between and identifying them and removing them was a straightforward exercise. The times have however changed. Today's viruses number in the countless amounts or even countless computer security. Computer virus protection history has therefore gone into what looks an endless cycle of evolution that will require virus killers to kill the virus, as the virus evolves to locate approaches to bypass the virus killer. When viruses first began these were largely practical jokes come up with by mischievous computer users and were generally spread through infected floppy disks, which was the main medium for exchange of information. Antivirus protection programs were made to detect and kill just a few viruses.

The Evolution of Virus Protection

The advent of the internet and its exploding number of users turned into rapidly spreading viruses that infected countless computers at the same time. Virus protection subsequently progressed into an industry with the burgeoning variety of people looking for virus protection. These changes took devote the 1990's, and the virus protection industry has since become a multimillion dollar one. It was in this period that antivirus protection programs began to look into realtime protection. They developed Terminate and Stay Resident or TSR programs monitored the systems constantly to test for the clear presence of the viruses that they had been programmed to deal with.

Today's viruses are developing into tools that catch your own personal information as well as your money. Cybercrime has changed into a white collar crime that attracts a lot of people who have computer knowledge and lax scruples, who find the internet a good way of earning profits through the spread of viruses they write. The wide spread of E-mail has helped such unscrupulous persons. It is estimated that two hundred new viruses enter the cyber world every single day and antivirus protection agencies are forced to create almost daily updates for their virus protection programs. They've even started to use heuristic analysis for evaluation. In this analysis the programming commands of a script are executed in just a virtual machine while the original file itself is isolated. If viral activities like replication, file overwrites or attempts to disguise the file are detected, the file is deemed suspicious and an individual alerted. Another method used would be to analyze the source code within this system and compare it to known virus source codes. In case a match is located an individual is alerted.

The advent of macro viruses which targeted data instead of executable programs made life still more difficult for virus protection. This greatly increased the possibilities of infection as data was exchanged far more often than programs. This generated the development of content filtering at Internet gateways. The huge amount of spam or unwanted mail has made such content filtering almost mandatory.

Phishing attacks were another weapon utilized by virus writers. These create clones of existing sites and gull unsuspecting users into parting with sensitive information, which was then used for cybercrime. Virus protection vendors have developed personal firewalls and intrusion protection systems to shield against these.

Writing is a spare time activity which I've found again after being away from it for a few decades. Four decades actually while I was busy with a career as a civil engineer. Whether I is likely to be successful and be able to earn some funds from writing I do not computer security. But something is certain. The hours of the day pass by quite easily when I am writing and reading, and that is how I want the rest of my life to be. I write on nearly every topic that interest me, and my articles are on view on the web.