Size Matters To Virus Writers
from the smaller-and-smaller-and-smaller... dept
If you learned to program back in the days before gigabyte hard drives, you might remember a time when coding efficiency mattered. You actually wanted to make your programs as small as possible so they didn't take up too much room. Of course, hard drives started expanding, and bloated software became standard. Still, it appears there's one area where small programs rule: malicious worms and viruses. Apparently, all those worms and viruses bouncing back and forth are mostly under 20kb - showing just how easy it is to compromise a system. In fact, with such efficient code, worm writers are placing malicious code within their malicious code, and are still able to keep it nice and compact (and easier to slip in under the radar).
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Not to be pedantic
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Size
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Not to be pedantic
Windows XP Home Edition requires approximately 1,572,864 kilobytes
seems a new definition of approximate..
[ link to this | view in thread ]
wrong reason
[ link to this | view in thread ]