johnny@relay.EU.net (Johann Schweigl) (10/10/89)
Has it ever been tried to verify the center of 'epidemic' virus attacks?
What's in my mind is a map of the (PC)known world, splitted into
area codes.
Whoever catches a virus reports the type (if known), symptoms and number
of occurences on the PC's he takes care of. One for the late night home
hacker, lots for a company's support staff or universities.
If a virus begins to spread, USENET data exchange should be faster than
PD or pirated software exchange.
Data could be collected at one site in a relational database, with reports
sent every week (or so) to a new newsgroup (comp.virusmap)?
Some questions arise: Do you think, that
- the typical infection paths could be analyzed?
- this information would be useful to us?
- hyperproductive virus developers could be tracked down?
- virus avoidance could be made more effective?
- this would make any sense at all?
If the answer is yes, any ideas how to deal with
- the amount of data that should be expected?
- the world could be organized into areas (no problem within a town,
but I talk about something a little larger)?
In my opinion future Virus defence has to be active and aggressive, not
the passive sit-down-and-wait-for-somebody-developing-a-serum. There's
lot of infomation in this group, but it has to be cross-referenced to be
really useful and can be given to persons not in the USENET family.
By the way, has anybody read Michael Crichton's 'The Andromeda Strain'?
It's a evil book about a virus, just nothing to do with computers.
Shoot the viruses to Pluto. Then, never trust software from there. Johnny
- --
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