Re:The sorry state of Avira anti-virus heuristics
by tsally on Wednesday March 17, 2010 @08:14PM
(#1200066)
It's not all about the signatures. Vaccination would be just as ineffective as anti-virus if biological viruses were anything like computer viruses. Imagine billions of biological viruses that are instantly transmitted upon infection to anywhere in the world, have an immediate impact on the host, and can evolve and adapt with human-like intelligence. Good luck fighting that with vaccines.
Because computers are not human beings, if we can do detection well, than the problem of fighting an infection is already solved. Just run your server on a virtual machine verified by a trusted boot module. When an infection is detected, just roll back to a trusted snapshot or roll back to a clean install.
Re:The sorry state of Avira anti-virus heuristics
by Retric on Thursday March 18, 2010 @12:06AM
(#1200423)
Remember less than 1/2 the cells in your body actually contain your DNA. Yet signatures still work. Biological viruses are light years ahead of computer viruses. Picture a world where there where more computer virus strains than computers, they mutated millions of times a second, ignored firewalls and could attack computers though the electrical system. Further 1/4th of every nations GDP went to anti virus systems and had been for the last billion years.
PS: Virus writers have become far more tame but old school virus's would rewrite your BIOS.
Vaccination works by preparing the body to fight something that looks like X by dumping millions of copy of something that looks like X into your body. At which point your immune system feels it needs to really fight X with everything it has so it develops a specific response. aka Adaptive immunity is triggered in vertebrates when a pathogen evades the innate immune system and generates a threshold level of antigen. SEE: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_immune_system
This is also why you can have auto immune diseases, if you trip the "fight" response to something that should be left along you get a world of problems. You immune system is more than willing to kill cancer, or even normal cells, and inflammation can be vary harmful.