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How To Use a Virus To End The Internet: A Warning

Many people will undoubtedly criticize me for writing this article. After all, why should I give malicious virus writers more ideas than they already have? Many of you will put me in the same category as people who publish vulnerabilities publicly just to make companies like Microsoft look bad. But this is not meant as a how-to manual for virus writers, rather as a warning to the people that protect others from viruses: the system administrators and security experts of the world, and individual home computer users at large (who are responsible for the security of their own systems). There is most definitely nothing in this document that no one else could think of. Perhaps others just haven’t put all the pieces together yet. I don’t claim to have all the pieces myself, but if you read further, you will see what could likely be the worst virus outbreak yet.

Computer viruses have had an interesting history. It seems that the virus writers keep learning, but haven't quite learned enough and haven’t gotten the “big picture” just yet. Perhaps this is because most viruses are written by teenagers ages 15 to 19, teenagers who probably think they know everything and shun the experience of the older and mature; teenagers that think movies like Antitrust and Hackers are reality (though, no doubt they're smart enough to know that not all hackers use Mac's and have fancy GUIs like in the movies). We’ve seen address book viruses that send spam to everyone you know (assisted by programs like Outlook Express that automatically add anyone you reply to into your address book even if you’re replying to be removed from a mailing list). We’ve seen viruses that do Denial Of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial Of Service (DDoS) attacks to various sites. Most recently we’ve seen viruses that DDoS the windowupdate.microsoft.com website to prohibit people from getting vulnerability patches and updates. And now there are reports that recent viruses are most likely the cause of anti-spam sites going down [article]. But the virus writers seemed to have missed a big target and I wonder just how long this will remain overlooked?

Question:
Who protects us from these viruses?

Answer:
The anti-virus companies… companies and softwares like Norton/Symantec, McAfee, AVG, etc.

What would happen if the sites distributing the updated anti-virus definition files were unreachable due to a DDoS attack?

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