Virus Throttle a Hopeful Defense

Found this interesting article I though you might be interested in.

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Computer viruses and worms live in the fast lane, propagating themselves through a network faster than even the most highly caffeinated techie can purge them from a system.

But Matthew Williamson, a researcher at the Hewlett-Packard laboratories in Bristol, England, has come up with a new way to handle the quick-moving cybercritters: Throttle 'em.

Computers contaminated by a virus behave differently from uninfected computers. An infected computer's primary goal in life is to reproduce the virus it harbors. In order to do that, the infected computer will try to make connections –- through e-mail or directly -- with as many other computers as possible, as quickly as possible.

Williamson's idea hinges around slowing viral spread by limiting a computer's ability to connect to new computers.

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Story is here: http://www.wired.com/news/infostruct...,56753,00.html

What would be cool is a anti-virus program that nevers need updating. It'll be like a human, like an immune system. It would grow as the older it gets. So if a virus comes around it'll know, because this isn't what that person does on the PC. You see what i mean? A full scale Immune system for the Computer. That would be awesome! Anyways thats a cool article...

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What would be cool is a anti-virus program that nevers need updating. It'll be like a human, like an immune system. It would grow as the older it gets. So if a virus comes around it'll know, because this isn't what that person does on the PC.

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Nice thought, but we will always need to update our Computer's immune system just as we do with our human immune system. Vaccinations and antibiotics are just a few of the things we humans use to "update" our immune system. Virus scanning software does some adaption with heuristics, but there will always be that new, never seen before bug out there that will need some intervention, whether it be a new drug or a new dat file.

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Heuristics attempt to detect unknown viruses and often employ generalized signature scanning geared to detect "families" of viruses. If the virus is related to a known family, heuristics will detect it and report it as suspicious or infected with an unknown virus.

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