Advanced topic: experts claim thousands of viruses exist

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MYTH: "only 500 different viruses? But most experts talk about them in the thousands" (advanced discussion)

Dr. David Stang says:

Recent evidence suggests vendors don't want customers to believe there are more viruses than their product can detect. No vendor currently claims to detect more than 9,000 or so as of December 1996. In fact, 9,000 is an old number. Since we have 11,000 descriptions on the Seven Locks web site, and our descriptions are always behind, there may be quite a few more [byte-for-byte unique] viruses than that.

Whatever the number, no one can figure out what it is any more, because it would require owning copies of all of them, then establishing how many replicating copies were different -- by whatever definition was in use. (For instance, one definition might consider Stoned and Sanded to be different, since they contain different messages; a given scanner might or might not see this difference.)

I would estimate that there are about 12,000 viruses as of December 1996. But I also believe that there are many more "in the wild" than vendors would like us to believe. Surely, rare viruses like Laroux or Hare were in the wild in some quantity before they appeared on anyone's "wild list."