In the field of biology, not every virus or bacteria is bad for us, and some influential figures in IT services have proposed a similar approach to computer software.
The logic is that, much like how the human body is a complex ecosystem where some viruses and bacteria can help make people better or protect them from disease, self-replicating computer viruses could help make a computer run better or be safe from potential security threats.
There has been a lot of exploration of the concept since the dawn of modern IT, and remarkably there are some positive examples of how self-replicating software tools that function like viruses can benefit computer systems.
This concept, described as “living programs” in a Computer Science paper on the subject, involves the use of self-replicating and distributing software on a network to provide software updates, implement distributed databases and routinely clean up waste files.
However, whilst there are good intentions from the software engineers and members of tech support who propose such an idea, they can often have unintended side effects and can violate some fundamental principles of trustworthy computing.
From an ethical standpoint, any software that is designed to take control of a user’s computer without their permission is inherently unethical, even if its intentions are positive. It can also, in some countries and jurisdictions, qualify as a crime.
However, even from a practical standpoint, it is potentially unhelpful if not outright counterproductive.
Viruses are pieces of software, and because of this will use system resources even if they are doing so for “good” reasons without necessarily providing any control to the user to shut off the program if they want to.
Viruses often spread randomly, much like biological viruses, so their impact, beneficial or otherwise, cannot be predicted. If they are being used to update antivirus software, some computers may be left more vulnerable to others.
Finally, some viruses can have inadvertent results if they are corrupted before they can replicate properly, similar to a virus mutation. This ended up being the case for a worm at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre, which was meant to distribute computing tasks across workstations but crashed the entire network.
