The latest computer viruses-which can e-mail themselves to everyone in a host computer's electronic address book and change their appearance or even rewrite their own code to avoid detection-have created new problems for antivirus companies. But it turns out the most difficult challenge isn't analyzing the viruses or creating fixes for them-it's handling the flood of requests for help during an epidemic. When a fast-spreading virus infects many computers in a very short time, the number of virus samples submitted to an antivirus company for analysis increases by as much as three orders of magnitude, as does the number of requests for the antidote. This kind of jump makes most Web sites crash, but crashing during a virus outbreak is, obviously, a disaster for an antivirus company.

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