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).
Comments on “Size Matters To Virus Writers”
Not to be pedantic
and the author of the article made the same mistake, but the ‘b’ in ‘kb’ should be capitalized. ‘B’ == bytes, and ‘b’ == bits.
Re: Not to be pedantic
also:
Windows XP Home Edition requires approximately 1,572,864 kilobytes
seems a new definition of approximate..
Size
Why do you think that coding efficient no longer matters because we have big discs and lots of memory? A well written, efficient program will always be better than a hunk of cruddy bloatware!
wrong reason
The main reason for keeping programs small was the memory usage, not the disk space required to store them. This was especially true before virtual memory was commonly available.