Viruses of the 21st Century

A few that come to mind are the Love Bug and Sircam and also Code Red. We make little distinction between a Virus and a Trojan or a Worm anymore, because, with the ever increasing vastness of the Internet there does not seem to be a difference.

The definition of a virus would be a piece of computer code that propogates itself, and spreads to as many different hosts as possible. In the real world this can be seen through epidemics like the Flu.

In computer land, there are no 6 degree's of separation. Everyone is accessible by just one step, one email address, one common and easily accessible route to penetration and being infected by a virus.

The viruses of today, although they have caused a tremendous amount of fear, pale in comparison to what we might soon see in the future. The future I am talking about is made up of new kinds of, well let's just call them Smart Viruses. This is how I speculate such a superbug might appear.

A Smart virus would spread and have no limits as to what type of operating system it was infecting, be it Windows, Dos, Linux, Unix, etc. This virus would seek out all types of machines and scan them for vulnerabilities and ways to infect more computers.

It would use confidence trickery to persuade people to let it on their systems, maybe with a dictionary of common phrases for different languages.

It could disguise itself an official document from whoever, or a new jpeg of your sister's daughter or a lawyer with a court order requesting your reply.

Perhaps even Old Uncle John, your father's great uncle kicked the bucket and attached is his will telling you how much money you have inherited.

This smart virus will also travel around with you, be near impossible to get rid of, overwriting files, hooking itself into registry files, making itself meld with your computer and data. And any attempts to destroy it or get rid of it, clean it from your system, will only be met with the destruction of your data. I hope you have a backup right about now. This virus would be carried on a computer disk, would send itself to CD-ROMS you are burning, would change its structure and file name, and while an active copy of it is busy infecting other computers and destroying data, an inactive copy sits in the background, waiting to re-active itself if the other portion fails, gets detected, etc.

This smart virus will become your own intimate companion, and will disguise itself the better to backstab you. The file you open up will be an actual file, and may even look like some official document or picture or whatever. All of this is in an attempt to delay your detection of it so that it may propgate itself further.

The smart virus will, in every case of its infection of a system, change its code. Just like in real life where viruses mutate and can become more destructive, the smart virus will have its mutation program built in. It will constantly re-encrypt itself, change which procedures it calls, and disguise which form of the virus it is. You will not know if it is the bad virus or the horrible, or your computer is going to die, virus. In any case, any attempts at destruction of the virus will only be met with it destroying your data.

The smart virus will also be a set of sophisticated hacking tools. With the ability to scan the internet for vulnerabilities and exploit them. It can make detailed reports of what it has found which will be discussed later. This virus will also use your spare CPU cycles to perhaps work on mass decryption, cracking passwords in the background, and use your computer to break into other computers.

Along with a smart virus will be a smart mutation engine. Not only will this change the virus everytime it infects a computer. It will change itself according to the system it infects. If you have an old copy of DOS and somehow have an internet connection running through good old bitcom or something similar, this virus would become very small, probably hook itself into your RAM and everytime you boot your machine it would be there. If it is infecting a Windows operating system, it will become a much larger version of itself, re-writing its own code to infect other such machines.

The point of these mutations is just the same as in real life. When a virus of this nature changes itself, and infects other computers, the more successful it is, only means that particular mutation has worked well. I would theorise a virus of this nature would only get better at learning how to infect other computers. And it will become more refined as time goes by. It will throw away useless parts of its code to trim its size, it will constantly be re-encrypting its source code to evade virus scanners. It will infect one Windows machine, learn how to infect 100 more, then become even smarter and learn how to infect thousands more with even more efficiency. There would be no similar phrase or easily detectable way to tell if what you are getting is a joke from your friend Joe or a virus from Joe's computer.

There will also be random triggers built into the smart virus. These will go off on random days, so that it is not infecting computers simultaneously. A delay in a virus causes a much more serious threat, especially if that virus has mutated and cannot be detected with a virus scanner. Then, 365 days a year, at least one copy of a mutated virus will be trying to spread itself. The virus will also be smart enough not to re-infect a computer that has already been infected, unless however, the mutated version of the virus is better than the original. In this case, the mutated version will take over since it is more adept at wanton destruction and propagation than its previous generation.

There has to be some destruction and spreading of vital information that the general public will definitely not want. This virus will take all deemed important documents, pass them through email as part of the virus, as well as posting them on usenet newsgroups throughout the internet. No one group will be targeted, but a smart enough person would be able to figure out the pattern or which postings are from the virus. The information contained may perhaps be encrypted so that only an elite few can access this information. Then all they have to do would be release this virus, and scan newsgroups daily for their victims remains. What would be contained would probably be unimaginable.

Letters from good old Aunt Trudy, official business documents not to be seen by the public, login names and passwords to various websites, anything at all contained on your computer or a government computer that was supposed to be private would be made public. And made public only to an elite few who could use this information in ways I will not even mention.

Questions, Comments, more theories? Email Zach Gusky