A weakness that a computer virus has is that it must be identifiable.
When a virus tries to infect another program, it has to check that a
copy of itself is not already contained within the program. If this
check is not performed, the infected program may crash, or grow
exponentially in size.
For a computer virus to check that it has not already infected a program,
it must check some characteristic that is uniquely identifiable. It is
this identification that virus hunting programs can look for.
I was wondering if there is an analogy in the biological world. When a
virus infects a cell, I would have thought it would be counter productive
for a second infection.
Is it known how many times a single cell can be infected ?
Pete Leaback.
