Now don't get me wrong, I hate viruses with a passion. Even though I was, and remain, fascinated with cyberlife I hate unauthorized viral intrusions.
Having been around in the good old days before the Internet was privatized, I miss the open and free environment that once represented cyberspace. It was like living back in the 1950s (so I'm told) when people didn't usually bother to lock their doors. In the original Internet (if there was such a thing), nobody locked their electronic doors either.
The law enforcement profiles for virus-writers reads very much like the profile for a Uni-bomber wannabe. Disaffected, polite, keeps to self, shy, alienated, underachiever, higher IQ. So the virus phenomena is definitely dysfunctional. Like you, I have lost data and many weekend hours trying to recover from these malicious attacks.
On the other hand, I think there is an evolutionary purpose for the virus phenomena in cyberspace just like there is a purpose for biological viruses in realspace.
Before viral attacks (and I include all malware) became common, the Internet was homogeneous. Homogeneous systems are prone to catastrophic failure. By defending against viral attacks, the Internet is structured with defensive barriers much like the sealed compartments in a submarine. In an open environment like the early Internet, a single threat could destroy the integrity of the whole system. With compartmentalization, it is unlikely that a single attack (whether natural or man-made) would bring a significant portion of cyberspace to its knees.
I am a big proponent of standardization, but with standardization comes homogeneity and with homogeneity comes systemic vulnerability. So standardization is very important, but so is variance across populations, even in cyberspace.
Back in the days of pandemic plague in the Middle Ages, everyone who was susceptible to a particular disease vector died. This meant that the remaining population was very resistant to those threats. The problem was that those plagues were attacking homogenic populations and so they managed to kill huge numbers of people very quickly. The intemixing of people groups, increased travel and communication (and its accompanying exposure to a wider variety of disease vectors), and repeated pandemics actually produced (in my humble opinion) a genetic stock that was capable of ushering in social systems that covered large geographic areas.
So it is with software attacks and malware. Had a modern software virus attack been let loose in the Internet of the early 1990s, it could have conceivably had the effect of an electronic pandemic.
©Copyright Mark Ragar Schneider, 2009 All Rights Reserved
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