Some thing about future viruses

While the technological advances that have resulted in our world's current dependence on computers can be easily predicted, David Perry believes it is impossible to foresee the social ramifications of these technologies. The fragility of this system is perfectly highlighted by the fact that a bored teenager in a bedroom can knock together a bit of code capable of destroying data all over the world.
Where Are We Now?
"The computer virus era is about ten years old, and we have been through a lot of different phases in this time. The original viruses were boot-sector viruses and file-infecting viruses. These were replaced in the middle of the last decade with Word and Excel macro viruses, which increased the number and availability of viruses and the ease with which viruses could be written. These led on to script-kiddie viruses, where people with relatively low skill created viruses using toolkits that can be found on the Internet. Then we enter the world of the worm, leading to today's hybrid server/email worms."
Who is WritingToday's Viruses?
"The Anna Kournikova virus was written by someone who doesn't have any idea of how to write a computer program, let alone a computer virus. So we can abandon the image of a virus writer being some kind of advanced hacker or super-user of a computer. These writers are mainly male, aged between 15 and 25, and generally speaking, they are assembling the viruses out of other viruses."
The Future of Viruses"I would say that more viruses will be written using pieces of viruses, and exploits that have come from the past, because the past is the best indicator of the future."
"The second thing I would look for would be the development of viruses that exploit wireless telecommunications between digital devices, but I don't think we'll see these come to fruition until powerful applications arrive on BlueTooth and iMode phones that can trade executable code. Actually, I don't think the wireless virus will be here until 2005, but I could be wrong about that.
"Next I would expect to see more viruses written by groups of people. Ten years ago the viruses were a hundred bytes tall, but today they are 1.5Mb. We have viruses that are bigger than most of the operating systems we have used in the history of computer science. So; bigger, more complicated, more hybrid viruses."
"The biggest short term threat is related to broadband communication - cable modems and DSL. This represents a special kind of threat to the end user for certain kinds of viruses. Denial-of-service attacks need broadband connections, also, backdoor Trojans are more attractive to high-speed connections than they are to dial-ups."
Solutions?Trend Micro has an upcoming new technology for broadband users, called Gatelock (£70-£140), which is a hardware solution that sits between your cable modem and your computer. The anti-virus side of this prevents viruses getting through to your desktop, while the firewall alerts you to hacker attacks.
"One big area that does need to be looked at is virus education." Using the motor car as an example, Perry continued, "You know how to put oil into the car, you know not to take the radiator cap off when it is hot, and you know when your tyres are low. That's a large body of information you carry around with you, and we need to have a similar amount of knowledge to handle viruses properly."
Perry hopes that we can all develop a similar body of knowledge with regards to viruses, so think before clicking that strange and unexpected attachment...