Page 70 - Cyber Defense eMagazine for July 2020

How To Fight A Virus: Lessons From Cybersecurity

By Yotam Gutman, SentinelOne

There has been a great deal of conversation around the similarities between the spread of the Covid-19
virus and that of computer viruses. And indeed, as the first global pandemic to occur during the age of
connectivity, this comparison is valid. But while most focus on how we can leverage the knowledge gained
in the “real world” in identifying and stopping the spread of plagues in the virtual world, I would like to
offer another perspective.

Perhaps we in cybersecurity can return the favor. Perhaps the medical world can take the lessons learned
in three decades of fighting “cyber viruses” and implement these in their fight to mitigate the Coronavirus?

History

Originally, the type of computer software described as “a program that can infect other programs by
modifying them to include a, possibly evolved, version of itself” was named “Virus” by Fred Cohen in his
1986 Ph.D. thesis. Another biological reference made its way into the computer lingo when the first worm
was unleashed (although the phrase was used in an earlier sci-fi novel).

In the last couple of years, computer viruses, or more widely the panoply of malware as we think of
cybersecurity today, have undergone rapid evolution that has made them much more difficult to identify
and mitigate:

Cyber Defense eMagazine –July 2020 Edition 70
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