6- Predicting the FutureWe have come to the surprising conclusion that the world's computing environment has been the primary factor in determining the change in prevalence of computer viruses. It is reasonable to assume that this will continue to be the case for some time. If this is so, we can get some insight into future problems by examining current trends and the expected changes in the computing environment over the next several years. Some of these changes will tend to decrease viral prevalence, while others will tend to increase it. If there were no changes in the world's computing environment, we might expect to see current trends continue. File viruses would continue to remain very low in prevalence. Boot viruses that have already reached equilibrium, such as the Form virus, would remain at about the same level of prevalence that they have today. Other boot viruses would be expected to start becoming more prevalent, perhaps rising in prevalence until they too reached equilibrium. Since there are several hundred boot viruses, having all of them rise in prevalence to the level that Form has reached would result in a huge rise in virus incidents worldwide. There are, however, some environmental changes that we might expect over the next few years: 32-bit operating systems and networking. These changes could have a significant effect on the virus problem.
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