Abstract
Technical accounts of computer viruses usually focus on the microscopic
details of individual viruses: their stucture, their function, the type
of host programs they infect, etc. The media tends to focus on the social
implications of isolated scares. Such views of the virus problem are
useful, but limited in scope.
One of the missions of IBM's High Integrity Computing Laboratory is to
understand the virus problem from a global stand perspective, and to
apply that knowledge to the developement of anti-virus technology and
measures. We have employed two complementary approaches: observational
and theoretical virus epidemiology. Observation of a large sample
population for six years has given us a good understanding of many
aspects of virus prevalence and virus trends, while our theoretical
work has bolstered this understanding by suggesting some of the
mechanisms that govern the behavior that we have observed.
