RIDDING your computer of a virus does not mean you can relax. It could return
months or even years later—and researchers will tell a conference in Paris
next week that this is much more likely to happen than was previously thought.
What’s more, things can only get worse as the Internet expands.
Until now, most analysis of the way computer viruses proliferate has been
based on some of the ways biological viruses spread. Numbers of the virus either
increase exponentially, with each computer infecting several others in a chain
reaction, or it dies out quickly. Which of these paths…
