On Monday 24 Jun 2002 5:21 pm, Kathy Salkin wrote:
> I clicked on a link to a website this weekend, and got a virus from
> the site. Arghhhh!  I immediately shut down the connection and did
> a virus scan and cleanup.  Virus programmers should be taken out
> and shot.
>
> Kat
>

I blame the O/S designers (Windows) for making it so easy to write
viruses. Virus scanners are the wrong solution, all the popular ones
scan for "known signatures" however its fairly easy to write a
polymorphic code generator attached to a virus which would defeat all
signature based scanners since the signature would be different for
every generation of the virus, and you can bet the "military" virus
writers have had the same thoughts.

The "correct" way of dealing with virii has been known for years, you
run programs which have contact with tainted sources (e-mail clients,
web browsers, etc.) in a "virtual" machine, if you catch something
nasty it just trashes the virtual machine and you hit one button and
you virtual machine is wiped and recreated in a pristine condition
again, a matter of seconds. Java has this idea, but Microsoft are
killing that off. Virus scanner software companies hate the idea,
since they would all go out of business - so it will never happen,
and you all pay your annual subscription to get the most up to date
virus signature files.

Cheers

Deri