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British engineers found new way to stop computer viruses in their tracks

Nov 27, 2009 Software

When a new virus hits the Internet, there is little that an anti-virus software can do to stop the malware on the very day. But now British engineers have come up with an answer to the problem. Engineers Simon Wiseman and Richard Oak from defense technology company Qinetiq, Worcestershire, have found a way to stop computer viruses in their tracks by intercepting every file that could possibly hide a virus and adding a string of computer code to it that will disable any virus it contains.
Their technique mainly targets emailed attachments and adds the extra code to them as they pass through a mail server.

A key feature of the scheme, which they are patenting, is that no knowledge of the virus itself is needed, so it can deal with new, un-recognised “zero day” viruses as well as older ones, journal New Scientist reported.

Many mailservers already block attachments that will run as executable programmes – such as PC files with a .exe suffix – in case they are viruses.

But virus writers have tricks up their sleeve to get round this. For example, they can disguise files as an innocent Microsoft Word (.doc) or Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) file to fool unsuspecting users into converting them into an “executable” program file that will run on their computer.

Qinetiq aims to prevent this by inserting a line of machine code – the raw code that microprocessor chips understand – into the header area of incoming files.

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