There seems to be an active rivalry between the authors of competing computer viruses, with back-and-forth insults included in the textual comments within each virus, according to a Mike Musgrove story in today’s Washington Post.
Witty repartee it’s not: “Bagle – you are a looser!!!” But one does worry about what will come next, if the loosers decide to escalate from a war of words to an e-war. If that happens, the next step will be new virus versions that try to inoculate victims’ machines against rival viruses. And don’t expect the kind of clean, surgical inoculation you get from a good antivirus product, but a crude rewiring of the victims’ software configuration, causing all sorts of trouble.
In the worst (but unlikely) case, this could escalate into a full-on game of distributed core wars, with rampaging malware armies clashing in the computers of people foolish enough to click on the wrong attachments.
Let’s hope this doesn’t happen. And let’s all remember to update our antivirus software and be very suspicious of email attachments.
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