On Thu, 1 Nov 2001, Lorin wrote: > I wonder if anyone will ever develop a continually mutating virus that > will be unstoppable by current anti-virus software? From what i > understand, most virus software looks at files, and checks for a specific > sequence of bytes that represent the 'signature' of the virus. how hard > would it be to build a virus that recompiles itself, changing it's > signature?
Reasonably easy to make it do better than a non-scrambling one, completely impossible to make it do so in a way which can't be noticed by statistical technique. Pretty much the same techniques human immune systems use to recognize viruses work for recognizing software viruses. The state of virus writing and stopping is, as with everything else in computers, 20 years behind the computer science state of the art. -Bram Cohen
