November 10th, 2009 | By Antonie Geerts
My track record in computing has now been 15 years of active using it starting it out with programming on my MSX and Commodore 64, driving up the phone bills with my first 286 and a 14.4K modem and eventually ending up as an IT engineer for a 40 hours work week. In those years I seen a lot of changes and one of the most unanticipated changes was that of the virus. Back in my school years I used to write simple “viruses” myself just to fool my classmates and although it might not have been very nice of me, back in the day it gained popularity in the school I was attending. Now years later the viruses are not there to piss off your class mates but they are there to do serious damage to the users of computers and the inescapable Internet.
The virus I wrote was a simple Turbo Pascal program that would keep on writing to the hard disk until it ran out of space. Fixing it was easy; remove the large file and never touch the program that says “runme.com” again. Nowadays however viruses dig deep in to the computer registry and in to your own files, especially the latest trend is the infecting of web pages on your computer which due to most browsers inability to check you will not notice until someone is mentioning it and than more then often you will not really understand what is going on and you will ignore it. What happens is that the virus will add a little section to the lower part of your webpage which will load in a malware site, spam site or even a “SEO Juice” website. You will not see the difference in your editor and right clicking on the page will often not display it either.
So why this virus? What do the creators of this virus gain by infecting my pages.
Simple answer is cold hard cash, most of the newest viruses are there to serve a purpose by having your website link to a spammers website will result in that website having a huge number of inbound links and with a huge number of inbound links the website will become more popular for sponsors , advertisers and the search engines.
