This month VB lab team put 14 business products and 30 consumer products to the test on Windows 8.1 Pro. The VB100 pass rate was decent, although not quite up to the perfect or near-perfect fields seen in a few recent tests. John Hawes has the details.
In November 1995, self-confessed virus writer Christopher Pile - author of the viruses Pathogen and Queeg and the encryption engine known as SMEG (Simulated Metamorphic Encryption Generator) - became the first person in the UK to be given a custodial sentence for writing and distributing computer viruses when he was jailed for 18 months. Jim Bates was the expert witness for the Crown and describes the process which led to the conviction.
In November 1995, self-confessed virus writer Christopher Pile - author of the viruses Pathogen and Queeg and the encryption engine known as SMEG (Simulated Metamorphic Encryption Generator) - became the first person in the UK to be given a custodial sentence for writing and distributing computer viruses when he was jailed for 18 months. Ian Whalley wondered whether the punishment fitted the crime.
In June1997, Phil Crewe brought us 'Through the Administrator's Eye' - a detailed guide for administrators on how to approach virus protection and recovery, in which he notes that "A policy of virus detection and protection which is known and understood within a company will not only help you to trap a virus earlier, and therefore not send out an infected floppy disk to a client, but it will also enable you to have some authority to say to the client 'it cannot be us' when they report a virus to you."
Back in 1996, the memory limits of the DOS environment posed issues for anti-malware developers that we wouldn't give a second thought to today. While scanners were already "groaning" under the load of the ever-increasing number of viruses (the growth in the number of known viruses was then around 150-200 per month), the need to add complex new scan capabilities - for dealing with macro viruses - threatened to be the last straw for some. The solution for several products of the time was to supply a second executable offering macro-scanning functionality. Then Editor of VB Ian Whalley quite rightly argued that it was unreasonable to expect people to have to run multiple programs to detect different types of virus and wondered where we would be if we had to have a product consisting of 9,500 separate executables, "one for every virus..."