Q&A: Dallas' emergency dispatch computers are latest virus victim

By TANYA EISERER / The Dallas Morning News
teiserer@dallasnews.com

On Sunday, a computer virus was discovered in the city of Dallas' emergency dispatch system, forcing it to shut down for several hours. Worris Levine, head of the city's communications and information services department, on Monday declined to name the specific virus that infected the system, citing security concerns.

"If I let you know what happened, then everybody else will know what to do," he said.

We asked David Perry, global director of education for California-based Trend Micro Inc., one of the largest security software makers, to talk to us about the world of "malware," which is basically attack software designed to invade and infect a computer system.



On how many different viruses are out there:

"We get a new one every 2 ½ seconds, or about a quarter [of] a million a week, or a million a month. We're looking at a future when we get a million virus samples a day."

On who is behind Internet malware:

"Almost all of them are created for organized crime purposes. They are stealing information for profit. They're not about destroying data.

"We're expecting to see more international espionage and international sabotage. It's very centered in Eastern Europe, Russia, Bulgaria and the Ukraine. We also see a lot of malware coming from India, China and Brazil."

On how malware infects a closed environment like a police dispatch system:

"It could either be spread by network shares, shared files across a network. If they're protected by password, the virus could hack the password. It could be spread through USB sticks [flash drives]."

On what technologies are in the works to combat Internet malware:

"We're coming up with different methodologies. In the future, when you touch a Web site, we'd send it to a service that lives in the Internet that checks ... for the bad guy Web sites."

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