0x600 COUNTERMEASURES
The golden poison dart frog secretes an extremely
toxic poison—one frog can emit enough to kill 10
adult humans. The only reason these frogs have such
an amazingly powerful defense is that a certain species
of snake kept eating them and developing a resistance.
In response, the frogs kept evolving stronger and stronger poisons as a
defense. One result of this co-evolution is that the frogs are safe against all
other predators. This type of co-evolution also happens with hackers. Their
exploit techniques have been around for years, so it’s only natural that
defensive countermeasures would develop. In response, hackers find ways
to bypass and subvert these defenses, and then new defense techniques are
created.
This cycle of innovation is actually quite beneficial. Even though viruses
and worms can cause quite a bit of trouble and costly interruptions for busi-
nesses, they force a response, which fixes the problem. Worms replicate by
exploiting existing vulnerabilities in flawed software. Often these flaws are
undiscovered for years, but relatively benign worms such as CodeRed or Sasser
force these problems to be fixed. As with chickenpox, it’s better to suffer a