London: When a new virus hits the Internet
there is little that an anti-virus software can do to stop the
malware on the very day, but now British engineers have come
up with an answer to the problem.
Engineers Simon Wiseman and Richard Oak from defence
technology company Qinetiq, Worcestershire, have found a way
to stop computer viruses in their tracks by intercepting every
file that could possibly hide a virus and adding a string of
computer code to it that will disable any virus it contains.
Their technique mainly targets emailed attachments and
adds the extra code to them as they pass through a mailserver.
A key feature of the scheme, which they are patenting,
is that no knowledge of the virus itself is needed, so it can
deal with new, unrecognised "zero day" viruses as well as
older ones, journal New Scientist reported.
Many mailservers already block attachments that will run
as executable programs - such as PC files with a .exe suffix -
in case they are viruses.
But virus writers have tricks up their sleeve to get
round this. For example, they can disguise files as an
innocent Microsoft Word (.doc) or Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file to
fool unsuspecting users into converting them into an
"executable" program file that will run on their computer.
Qinetiq aims to prevent this by inserting a line of
machine code - the raw code that microprocessor chips
understand - into the header area of incoming files.
Bureau Report
