May 26, 2003 Most people will tell you that the only good computer virus or worm is a dead virus or worm. But this doesn’t have to be the case. A long-standing debate has argued that good viruses and worms could be used to repair security leaks. Some of the more recent worms (Nimda, Code Red, etc.) took advantage of security flaws that could have been fixed months or years ago. Some infected over 80,000 computers in under a minute, bringing the Internet to a grinding halt. Perhaps this argument should be looked at again. If a ‘good worm’ standard was written and a supervisory body was appointed to watch over the development and propagation of the worms, then Internet stability would improve. Operating system patches could be put inside a ‘good worm’ and then released to update every server on the Internet. There are many issues involved in this type of decision. Without a responsible body overseeing this type of project, we would have the nothing more than ‘vigilante worms’. What we need are ‘police worms’. Who would manage the worms? What kinds of security updates would be allowed or disallowed? How would we be notified that a worm had fixed our computer? Would we be able to tell worms to leave our computers alone if we didn’t want any friendly help? Some of these issues are large and would require quite a bit of compromise. However, once we overcome these obstacles, it could yield a great improvement.
Reform Evil Viruses