Beyond

I was checking my email earlier when I saw an interesting article on a new type of social-network worm:

“Security company ESET’s analysis of Win32/Inject.NBL reveals it to be an interesting piece of malware.” “This instant messaging-based bot has the following functions built into it:

• download
• update
• rm
• msn.msg
• msn.stop
• aim.msg
• aim.stop
• triton.msg
• triton.stop

In other words, it can download files, update itself, remove itself, and send messages through MSN Messenger, AIM and Triton, spreading itself on those networks. This is a nice chunk of functionality.”

What next - A virus that decides whether it likes you or not? Are viruses becoming more intelligent? The first viruses were more an annoyance than anything else; soon to be followed by the destructive type of virus that lurks on your system undetected until its clock reaches zero-hour and it delivers harmful payloads that wreak havoc with your machine. Around the same time they were equipped with their own SMTP engines, enabling them to mail themselves as an attachment to a bogus email-message on the internet to any email addresses that they could find on the host machine…You know the story.

Not long ago appeared the network-aware variety of virus that actively sought out unprotected paths in cyberspace to infest anything from individual computers to entire networks: The first signs of intelligence.

Nowadays worms are infecting individual machines and adding them to a collective, using those collectives as botnets to launch mass DDOS attacks, send and relay spam and [illegal] porn.

As computers develop in sophistication, will we one day see independent malevolent data-entities roaming the web, looking for a computer to possess and set up home in, like some form of information-based AI? In my opinion it’s not that far off being a future reality given the right circumstances. Could our computers eventually at a future date become a separate living collective entity - Life; but not as we know it? Maybe it’s already starting to happen?
Is “Skynet” only a piece of science fiction from the Terminator series; or will some similar lifeform eventually evolve? Will that lifeform be malevolent? In my estimation, if it actually did happen, probably not; given that it would have access to nearly all of human knowledge and be able to devise intelligent and productive concepts for itself from that information. Without doubt it would probably be hard to live with; particularly initially, but I feel that soon certain people would befriend it and it would learn from them as well as they from it. Could such an entity become a new “god” that lives in cyberspace? Would there be a Cyber-Fundamentalist cult? What are your thoughts on this?

In their press release on this new version of the old threat, the FBI said:

“The spammers spreading this virus are preying on Internet users and making their computers an unwitting part of criminal botnet activity. We urge [all] citizens [of every country] to help prevent the spread of botnets by becoming web-savvy.”

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