Category: Uncategorized

CODE NATURAL SELECTION. "Those features that provide the virus with an evolutionary advantage (e.g., escaping detection, infecting different platforms, etc.) will be propagated, leading to unanticipated complex behaviors." The survival of the fittest code, in Darwinian terms. https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

LARGE CODE SOURCE. "As in biology, the collection of software and APIs in an operating system environment is sufficient for providing a pool of features that a virus can choose to sample." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

THE LEAPING ACCUMULATION OF SMALLS. "The myriad examples...of unintended virus behaviors due to random changes are all examples of more complex behaviors originating from simpler ones through small programming jumps." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

EMERGENT PROPERTIES. "We can imagine the emergence of arbitrary complexity in autonomously evolving computer viruses." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

IS SMALL SUFFICIENT? "The question that arises from these examples is whether small malware code changes—even if collected under a single malware implementation—are sufficient for the evolution of the functional complexity exhibited by biological viruses." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

GIANT CODE. "Imagine a random change that results in the macro code becoming very large, either as the result of several layers of merged code or additional polymorphisms. This can easily exhaust typical scanning engines for macro viruses due to memory limitations reserved for the macro code within the engines. As a consequence, an evolved copy can potentially escape just by being too large." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

DORMANT CODE. "During a mode of viral reproduction termed “lysogenic”, viruses such as bacteriophages integrate their genome into the host’s genome and become dormant. When such viruses convert back to the lytic (aggressive) mode of reproduction, they excise themselves from the genome." https://lnkd.in/dGC6A7c View in LinkedIn

CHIMERIC CODE. "In the event of coinfection, the excised viral genome might be a combination of more than one viral strain leading to the creation of chimeric viral particles." 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