Electronic and Biological Virus Replication
Whether it’s electronic or biological, understanding viral replication can help us fight back

I have always been fascinated by molecular machinery. In college and graduate school, I spent the majority of my time deep in the “stacks” studying the mechanisms by which biological viruses replicate. Now, my career is dedicated to analyzing viruses that are electronic. Although they are completely different domains, they share many of the same foundational concepts.
As most people know, unlike bacteria, viruses do not contain the necessary structural components to perform the task of replication. Essentially, like parasites, they borrow the goods from other cells, and upon entrance, utilize the host for this task. Although humans refer to this process as infection, from the perspective of the virus, it does what all of us are here to do, which is survive. Whether it’s a DNA-based virus in the cell nucleus or an RNA-based virus in the cytoplasm, they all utilize the same foundation for replication. In other words, they multiply their genome by borrowing the energy and synthetic machinery in the form of low molecular-weight precursors for the synthesis of proteins, which are then packaged to form new viral particles.
Moreover, a lot of viruses even invaginate the cell membrane and encase themselves in a pinocytotic vacuole, which ultimately protects them from host antibodies, like in the case of the HIV virus. But regardless of how deep the light is shined to reveal the process, it is ultimately a battle of survival, with one primary goal - the replication and transmission of code. And code is just another name for information.
Today, I’ve spent most of my time fighting a very similar battle. In the last three hours, I have been attempting to fix and inoculate approximately 3,400 files on a server that have been infected with a virus that is characteristic of ransomware. Although it’s foundation is electronic whose code is binary instead of genetic, the virus I have been fighting has the same goal as their biological relatives- to survive.
By using mechanisms that are synonymous to every living cell, such as transmission and replication, it is simply trying to create as many copies of itself as it can. Whereas the genetic code relies on a sequence of nucleotide triplets known as codons, this virus codes for a sequence of bytes that generate electronic transmissions to another set of code, which then replicates itself. Similarly, it also protects itself with an additional outer shell, using a marker that masks itself to normal antivirus and malware removal software. This camouflage allowed the virus to essentially go undetected for months, much like the Hepatitis C virus does in human targets.
Recently, a virus known as vaccinia was discovered to spread four times faster than what was previously thought possible in humans. In chemical kinetics, the rate-determining factor for the spread of a virus within the body was previously known to be how fast a virus could enter, replicate, then exit. However, unlike other common viruses, vaccinia can actually skip cells that have already been infected, thus speeding up transmission time greatly. It does this by marking the surface of an infected cell with two proteins and subsequently expressing the markers. This expression results in the production of proteins called actin tails, which serve to push away additional viral particles that wish to enter the cell. This way, there is a reduction in traffic and hence an increase in overall infection speed. Moreover, because there isn’t what amounts to viral waiting lines and hence an increase in surface area, time decreases even more.
About an hour ago, while reproducing the electronic virus I was working on in a virtual machine, I noticed that it had the ability to infect thousands of files in seconds. After isolating the code and decrypting the payload, I noticed that not only did it randomly cause infection by rolling electronic dice, but more important, it sent messages to other files to test for infection first. Right now, I am working on a test suite to see how effective this mechanism is, and why it was put there in the first place if speed isn’t increased. Were they using biomimicry when they created this piece of code? Perhaps, and it wouldn’t be the first time.
The primary purpose of this article is to illustrate how similar viruses are, regardless of the domain. Whether it be biological or computational, the mechanism of infection, replication, and transmission contain many of the same components and algorithms. It is yet further evidence that when God created the world, he did so based on the rules of mathematics. However, I have always believed, and perhaps now even more, that something else is at work at a much deeper level. This is not an exercise in trying to anthropomorphize bits and bytes.
My point is that we are all made of the same thing, which is information. I think the greater question is not what we are built from, but why? In other words, why does information want to travel, why does it have the inherent energy to be put into motion, and most important, why does it want to replicate just to survive?
