This Throwback Thursday, we turn the clock back to April 1999, when the average virus analyst had to manually process around ten or more viruses per day, and the growing complexity and volume of viruses was proving a headache.
By the early years of the 21st century, the volume of malware was such that no functioning virus lab would be able to process all newly discovered malicious samples without the help of automated analysis systems. In 1999, however, everything was still done manually — and processing new viruses was becoming an increasing headache for analysts.
In 1999, the count on the virus analyst’s conveyor belt was several hundred new viruses and variants each month, meaning that the average virus analyst had to process around ten or more viruses per day. Vendors found that it was nigh on impossible simply to throw more analysts at the problem, as it was so difficult to find experienced virus analysts (at least without a virus-writing past). Inaccurate processing of samples by an inexperienced analyst risked causing false positives and negatives, while automatic or semi-automatic analysis risked low detection rates and/or missed infections. In the April 1999 issue of
Virus Bulletin
, Eugene Kaspersky described the headaches facing the virus analyst of 1999, including new platforms and formats, macro viruses, high-level-language viruses and anti-disassembling tricks — concluding that no amount of pain killers could ease the pain!
Eugene Kaspersky’s article can be read
here
in HTML-format, or downloaded
here
as a PDF.
Posted on 20 August 2015 by
Helen Martin
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