Category: Uncategorized

NOT QUITE SILENT. "If a duplicated gene suffers only a few mutations, it may retain its original function and soon again become expressed. In fact it could evolve this way without necessarily ever becoming silent." It will be subjected to natural selection for fitness. https://lnkd.in/dH9XaVn View in LinkedIn

FORBIDDEN SILENT MUTATIONS. "New genes arise when existing genes are duplicated, undergo "forbidden mutations" as silent DNA, and reemerge as new genes with new functions. While silent, a gene cannot be improved or even maintained by natural selection. To arrive at a substantially different nucleotide sequence, we would expect many mutations to be required. These mutations will randomize the original sequence of the gene and it will lose its original meaning." https://lnkd.in/dH9XaVn View in LinkedIn

AVOIDING IMMUNE SURVEILLANCE. "Modern computer viruses use various mutation techniques such as polymorphism and metamorphism to evade detection." https://lnkd.in/d-ga_7a View in LinkedIn

MALWARE ARMS RACE. "The legendary Bulgarian writer Dark Avenger came up with a clever innovation known as a mutating, or polymorphic, virus. A mutating virus randomly reorganizes its decryption algorithm every time it replicates to outsmart the policing of the scanner. In step three, antivirus engineers devised "heuristic" scanners, built to sniff out all but an insignificant percentage of a virus' mutants through educated pattern recognition." https://lnkd.in/edrARjk View in LinkedIn

ESCAPING DIGITAL BIOCIDE. "Functional variants, on the other hand, because of the variation in behavior, can escape behavior-based detection methods." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

CO-INFECTION. "A form of evolution was observed in macro viruses, which often merge their code base into a document. Often the file has a clean macro, and a virus with a set of macros. In addition, another virus may insert its set of macros at the same time, leading to viral macro code merging with both viral and clean macro code. In biology, this phenomenon is quite common, and known as coinfection." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

COLD COMFORT. “The probability of extensive random corruption of a block of 1000 bits generating an exact match against the 1000 bit test virus is 1/2(1000) or ~10(-301)." Perhaps, however, this is not the right question. https://lnkd.in/dXsqH3b View in LinkedIn

SHARING GENES. "Even complete functionality might be snatched from another clean program, or another virus as well. As previously predicted, a cooperation protocol can enhance sharing of features between malicious executables as well. Code snatching is a tried and true function of almost all biological organisms." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

RANDOM MUTATED CODE. "A limited number of random mutation of computer viruses have been recorded, caused by data corruption in transit, or by a failure of system memory or disks. One example is the single byte modification in the 1704 strain of the IBM Cascade virus, detected in Yugoslavia. This has been attributed to random corruption rather than to deliberate modification. Some newer viruses incorporate self-correcting codes to avoid such in-transit corruption." https://lnkd.in/dXsqH3b View in LinkedIn

HYBRID CODE. "It is conceivable that an evolutionary function in the malware could snatch clean or malicious code from other programs. It could integrate code from other programs by identifying function prolog and epilog code." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn