Where Have the Viruses Gone?

Over the past few years, computer viruses have all but disappeared from malware development. We see rootkits, botnets, exploit kits, worms, and trojans galore, but viruses aren’t really common anymore. Even system re-infection doesn’t use viruses today — we see programs loaded into registry keys, or installed as tasks or services, but still, no viruses. Why is that? And, will they make a comeback?

First, let’s define a few terms quickly. A worm is a program that infects a remote, uninfected computer. A trojan as a program that claims to do one thing, but does something else, too. A virus is just a program that is able to inject itself into other programs and repl…
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