Shouldn’t the problem of viruses be stamped out or at least alleviated by BIOS, hardware and operating system designers? That’s the way it seemed to us, and Richard Levin, creator of Checkup virus prevention software and author of The Computer Virus Handbook thinks so too: according to Newsbytes, Levin says that a simple switch on a computer to eliminate unauthorised writes to critical areas of any hard disk, the boot sector and partition tables, could be implemented easily into personal computers and eliminate a whole class of viruses – and hackers have been tweaking their own systems and installing a write-protect switch for hard disks for some time, Levin told Newsbytes, but he maintains it is really the responsibility of industry hardware manufacturers, who need to set a standard and eliminate this type of virus problem – Writes to partition tables and boot sectors are rare, so a switch to prevent it would eliminate an entire class of viruses and would cost hardly anything to implement Levin declares.
