The Exploit: A Theory of Networks - asounder

84 Nodes
U.S. Navy computer clusters). Over the years, a whole bestiary of
infectious code has come to populate the information landscape,
including spam, spyware, and adware, as well as other nonvirus automated
code such as intelligent agents, bots, and webcrawlers.
Computer viruses thrive in environments that have low levels of diversity.
Wherever a technology has a monopoly, you will find viruses. They
take advantage of technical standardization to propagate through the
network. (This is why Microsoft products are disproportionately infected
by viruses: Microsoft eclipses the marketplace and restructures
it under a single standard.) Viruses and worms exploit holes and in
this sense are a good index for oppositional network practices. They
propagate through weaknesses in the logical structure of computer
code. When an exploit is discovered, the broad homogeneity of computer
networks allows the virus to resonate far and wide with relative
ease. Networks are, in this sense, a type of massive amplifier for action.
Something small can turn into something big very easily.
Anyone who owns a computer or regularly checks e - mail knows that
the virus versus antivirus situation changes on a daily basis; it is a game of
cloak - and - dagger. New viruses are constantly being written and released,
and new patches and fixes are constantly being uploaded to Web sites.
Users must undertake various prophylactic measures (“don’t open
attachments from unknown senders”). Computer security experts
estimate that there are some eighty thousand viruses currently recorded,
with approximately two hundred or so in operation at any given
moment. 63 Such a condition of rapid change makes identifying and
classifying viruses an almost insurmountable task. Much of this changeability
has come from developments in the types of viruses, as well.
Textbooks on computer viruses often describe several “generations”
of malicious code. First - generation viruses spread from machine to
machine by an external disk; they are often “add - on” viruses, which
rewrite program code, or “boot sector” viruses, which install themselves
on the computer’s MBR (master boot record) so that, upon
restart, the computer would launch from the virus’s code and not the