[Infowarrior] - The computer virus turns 25

[Richard Forno]

The computer virus turns 25

http://machinist.salon.com/

The computer virus turns 25 years old this year. It's been a rocky
quarter-century -- but according to Richard Ford and Eugene Spafford, two
computer scientists writing in this week's issue of the journal Science,
viruses can look forward to a long, fruitful life. The researchers say that
in today's hyper-connected world, when everything's got a chip in it and is
running software, stopping malware is basically an impossible task. (Their
article is not online.)

The computer virus conception story begins in 1981, when a tech-savvy 9th
grader named Richard Skrenta got an Apple II for Christmas. Over the
following few months he began cooking up ways to trick his friends using the
machine. "I had been playing jokes on schoolmates by altering copies of
pirated games to self-destruct after a number of plays," Skrenta once told
the tech news site Security Focus. "I'd give out a new game, they'd get
hooked, but then the game would stop working with a snickering comment from
me on the screen."

When his friends realized his tricky ways, they banned Skrenta from their
machines. And that's when he had an epiphany: He could put his code on the
school's computer, and rig it to copy itself onto floppy disks that students
used on the system. Thus was born Elk Cloner, the world's first computer
virus to spread in the wild. The virus didn't do much damage; it infected
the Apple II's OS and copied itself to other floppies, and every so often
would display a tittering message on the screen:

Elk Cloner: The program with a personality

It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes it's Cloner!

It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!

Ford and Spafford note that in the years since, as viruses spread to other
computer platforms and throughout the world, wreaking billions in damages,
there has been little progress in fighting them. There is a scientific
reason for this: "Building a computer program that can tell with absolute
certainty whether any other program contains a virus is equivalent to a
famous computer science conundrum called the 'halting problem,'" they write.
The halting problem concerns the difficulty of spotting whether a program
will terminate or continue to run forever. "It has no solution in the
general case and has no approximate solution for our current computing
environments without also generating too many false results," they write.

Ford and Spafford also take on the idea that Microsoft is to blame for our
current virus ills. Certainly MS has neglected to secure Windows, but any
platform that obtains ubiquity will become a target for attack, they note.
Some say the solution is to have a diverse computing environment -- if the
world ran all kinds of different platforms, rather than a Windows
monoculture, viruses would spread much less slowly. But diversity, Ford and
Spafford point out, creates its own problems -- if the Mac, Linux and
Windows all had roughly equal share, you'd need anti-virus teams working to
protect all three platforms, any one of which could serve as a weak point
for wider network destruction. Platform diversity, that is, increases the
"attack surface," they write.

Worse still is the potential for completely computer-free computer viruses.
They point to a chain e-mail message that counseled people to delete a
particular file from their computer to keep it secure. "The file they
deleted was critical to the system," it turned out. The "virus" that caused
its deletion was "executing" only in people's minds. And you can't get a
virus checker for the brain.

So right: Happy birthday, computer virus. Many happy returns!