2- The Status of the Virus Problem TodayOver the past decade, computer viruses have gone from an academic curiosity to a persistent, worldwide problem. Viruses can be written for, and spread on, virtually any computing platform. While there have been a few large-scale network-based incidents to date [7, 8, 9, 10] the more significant problem has been on microcomputers. Viruses are an ongoing, persistent, worldwide problem on every popular microcomputing platform. In this section, we shall first review briefly our methods for monitoring several aspects of computer virus prevalence in the world. Then, we shall present a number of the most interesting observations. We will attempt to explain these observations in later sections of the paper.
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