3 Others imagined life-forms evolving in computer networks and predators seeking them out and destroying them. 4 It was a common joke among science fiction fans that one day the North American telephone grid would develop consciousness. John Brunner's classic book Shockwave Rider described a program called a "tapeworm" that could roam the global network, cleaning up information per the sender's programming. 5 At about the same time, researchers at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) experimented with using "worms" to perform basic maintenance functions on their local area network. This isn't entirely science fiction any more.Ĭomputer organisms are reproducing worldwide. Some are mutating at a furious rate, spawning offspring in the blink of an eye. Aggressive anti-virus programs (AVPs) contend with viruses in memory and on disk. With the help of unethical, immoral, careless, stupid or crazy virus authors, viruses evolve in response to selection pressures, hiding themselves in new niches of the computer universe, or "cyberspace." Virus authors even take ideas from each other's viruses, leading to a form of primitive viral sexuality. Viruses are little programs that copy themselves into "host" programs, into documents or other files from Microsoft Office products, or into special executable "bootstrap" areas of disks. Once these infected programs are executed, the computer viruses, like biological viruses, subvert the normal functions of the operating system (OS). These parasitic programs commandeer CPU, memory and disk resources to replicate themselves. They insert themselves into other host entities, thus spreading the infection. When victims distribute infected programs, diskettes and documents, the viruses extend their range. Computer viruses even show some parallels to sexual reproduction: they can exchange "genetic" material through the agency of the twisted human beings who enjoy creating harmful programs and who share their knowledge with each other. Some macro viruses have been demonstrated to exchange executable code without human intervention when they infect the same documents. #MALWARE USED RUNONLY APPLESCRIPTS TO FIVE CODE#.
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