Art of Computer Virus Research and Defense, The

Chapter 6. Basic Self-Protection Strategies

“ There is every reason to believe that, as software technology evolves over the next century or so, there will be plenty of important and interesting new problems that must be solved in this field.”

—Dr. Steve R. White, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center

This chapter illustrates the most common self-protection techniques that viruses use to survive as long as possible—even on systems that are protected with a generic solution, such as a computer virus–monitoring program. Developing defense systems against computer viruses without giving consideration to these techniques is a sure path to failure.

6.1 Tunneling Viruses

Memory-resident viruses often use a tunneling technique to get around behavior ...