I tried to find a picture of the Scooby Gang unmasking a cartoon villain so I could post it with an 'and I would've got away with it if it weren't for you pesky kids!' caption but couldn't find one. Guess I'll have to give a serious reply instead. Sigh.
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Originally posted by ZTAngel: Who is creating these viruses? Is it some little high school computer dork?
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Quite possibly. The source code for most viruses is of course available on the 'Net. Newsgroup, forums and websites all discuss security problems discovered with computers, the latest viruses etc and how to write virii. Some people see it as a challenge, or a way of getting their names out there; much like graffiti.
Since you ask, from what is known most authors ARE high school or college students. Most are accomplished programmers in assembly language and other languages (those are different types of writing programs). Motives vary; as mentioned before a popular motive is notoriety, some are written to honor the author's hero, a funny game, a way to spread sociopolitical messages or some are written by tools in love - scripting messages to their girlfriends to flash on the computer screens of millions of people. A graph of when new viruses emerge shows peaks in the same months that high school and college students have their vacations - it's no coincidence there's a glut around now! The war between virus authors and anti-virus software companies raged even before Windows. Even MS-DOS 6 came with an antivirus program. As military historians know, volunteers often fight harder than paid mercenaries. Like a true zealot, a virus author is quite willing to stay up all hours, programmers working on anti-virus products on the other hand, generally go home at 5 pm. The battle won't end anytime soon.
The number of viruses in the world doubles probably about every ten months, some are rare and perhaps never found "in the wild" i.e outside the virus researcher's labs. In the past viruses took a long time to spread even with online BBS's. With the advent of the Internet, viruses spread covertly from system to system, reaching thousands of people in moments. As you have seen, new viruses are often written to take advantage of this convenient carrier system (e.g. 'email viruses').
In terms of what people can do to protect themselves, it's generally a matter of getting a decent anti-virus product and getting regular updates, plus applying relevant security updates for your system as they come out to avoid infection. The important thing is to subscribe for regular updates to your anti-virus software. Particularly for high risk users - these days anyone who shares software or connects unprotected to the 'Net. In days gone by one could probably get a shareware package to do the work, but with the vast amount of sites devoted to subverting computer security and writing viruses with how-to guides, it is no longer possible for people with limited resources to write cheap anti-virus software and update it when new viruses come up. Consequently we're at the mercy of anti-virus product companies as well as all those students. A shame p'raps but them's the breaks.