Malware: Fighting Malicious Code

Virus Propagation Mechanisms

I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species… You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet…

—Agent Smith, the bad guy in the movie The Matrix, 1999

As we've seen, once a virus is activated on a computer system, it knows how to locate and infect host programs on that machine. To replicate within the system, a virus might attach to boot sectors of floppy disks and hard drives. It might also look for documents, ...