Agriculture epidemics may hold clues to Net viruses

In studying the effects of last summer's MSBlast worm, some security experts turned to an unlikely source in search of clues to the prevention of computer epidemics: plants. Their idea was inspired by parallels that scientists are drawing between the proliferation of computer viruses and the spread of agricultural catastrophes such as Dutch Elm Disease, which has devastated a small variety of American elms since crossing the Atlantic decades ago. Like Dutch Elm, MSBlast was a single foreign entity that infected extremely susceptible hosts of an entire population--in this case, of Windows computers. "People have brought over species that we didn't expect here, just like people have created viruses that Microsoft didn't expect to deal with," said Jeff Dukes, professor of biology at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, who studies diversity and growth in ecological systems. "These introduced species have had a major impact on our forest and have knocked out entire species." Computer security experts see similarities between the way a disease can devastate agricultural crops and the way a virus can attack Internet infrastructure. The reliance on one type of technology, software or protocol has created digital "monocultures," a phrase borrowed from botany that refers to ecosystems vulnerable to disastrous harm from a single disease. ... ... Even scientists outside technology have expressed concern about the issue. In a letter to a publication called "Emerging Infectious Diseases," a journal of the federal Center for Disease Control, two microbiologists cited specific similarities in the nature of biological and computer viruses. "Biological viruses can mutate rapidly, create novel pathogenic and transmission routes, and develop antigenic variation to evade host immunity. In the computer world, worms exhibit similar behavior," wrote microbiologists Trudy M. Wassenaar and Martin J. Blaser." Are scientists just now figuring out there is a very close tie between biological & digital viri (the correct variant of the word virus when referring to more than one)? I think it is a good thing to have different software packages from different vendors on your machine - the main reason? If a virus hits, you have a greater chance that your whole system will not go down. If your PC's have software from one vendor (i.e. M$), there is a greater chance your whole system could go down b/c all the software packages are based on the same programming scheme - hence, same vulnerabilities throughout (also same security - gasp!). Just a thought.