ransomware

[Jane Maria]

The Beginning of Virus Protection

In early 1980's, virus protection was an easy task. Viruses were few and far between and identifying them and removing them was a straightforward exercise. The occasions have however changed. Today's viruses number in the thousands if not countless thousands. Computer virus protection history has therefore gone into what looks an endless cycle of evolution that requires virus killers to kill the virus, while the virus evolves to get methods to bypass the virus killer. When viruses first started they certainly were largely practical jokes assembled by mischievous computer users and were generally spread through infected floppy disks ransomware, which was the main medium for exchange of information. Antivirus protection programs were designed to detect and kill just a few viruses.

The Evolution of Virus Protection

The advent of the web and its exploding quantity of users converted into rapidly spreading viruses that infected countless computers at the same time. Virus protection in turn resulted in an industry with the burgeoning variety of people trying to find virus protection. These changes took invest the 1990's, and the virus protection industry has since become a multimillion dollar one. It had been in this period that antivirus protection programs began to look into real time protection. They developed Terminate and Stay Resident or TSR programs monitored the systems constantly to check on for the clear presence of the viruses that they'd been programmed to deal with.

Today's viruses are developing into tools that fish for your personal information or even your money. Cybercrime has turned into a white collar crime that attracts a lot of people with computer knowledge and lax scruples, who find the web a simple way of making money through the spread of viruses they write. The wide spread of E-mail has helped such unscrupulous persons. It is estimated that two hundred new viruses enter the cyber world each day and antivirus protection agencies are forced to make daily updates for their virus protection programs. They have even started to utilize heuristic analysis for evaluation. In this analysis the programming commands of a script are executed within a virtual machine while the first file itself is isolated. If viral activities like replication, file overwrites or attempts to disguise the file are detected, the file is deemed suspicious and the consumer alerted. Another method used is to analyze the origin code within this program and compare it to known virus source codes. If your match is found the consumer is alerted.

The advent of macro viruses which targeted data as opposed to executable programs made life still more burdensome for virus protection. This greatly increased the options of infection as data was exchanged far more often than programs. This led to the development of content filtering at Internet gateways. The huge amount of spam or unwanted mail has made such content filtering almost mandatory.

Phishing attacks were another weapon utilized by virus writers. These create clones of existing sites and gull unsuspecting users into parting with sensitive information, which was then useful for cybercrime. Virus protection vendors allow us personal firewalls and intrusion protection systems to protect against these.

Writing is an interest which I have acquired again after being far from it for several decades. Four decades actually while I was busy with a lifetime career as a civil engineer. Whether I will be successful and be able to earn some money from writing I do not know. But something is certain. The hours of the day pass by without difficulty when I'm writing and reading, and that's how I would like the others of my life to be ransomware. I write on just about any topic that interest me, and my articles are on view on the web.