Remember Michaelangelo?
Not the Renaissance painter, but the computer virus created a few years ago that spread fear and down-time among computer users around the world.
The good news is that the virus did not live up to all its publicity.. The bad news is that it's still around, along with thousands of other viruses, waiting to give your computer a case of indigestion, maybe something even worse perhaps.
More recently, the Hare Virus was in the news. But it too did far less damage than was expected. Despite the fact that some of the viruses have been over-hyped such viruses are still serious business.
The creation and spread of computer viruses, which started in the mid 1980s and roughly paralleled the growth of the personal compute--exposes a particular vulnerability with computers and the way that software--whether commercial, shareware, freeware or public domain--can easily be hacked and infected. An entire industry has been developed in order to write programs that combat such viruses.
So, just what is a computer virus? It's a program that's attached or included to another piece of software, usually by someone inserting some special programming code. Much like a human virus, a computer virus has two main functions: to spread or replicate itself and cause damage. Most computer viruses have a special 'signature' that makes them visible to anti-virus software, which then eliminates the intruder.
But there are also sinister viruses that act in a chameleon-line fashion, always changing themselves to avoid detection.
The mission of a computer virus is to disrupt the operation of your computer. A message may be displayed on your screen; programs that once loaded quickly now take a long time, and your data--letters, reports, spreadsheet calculations--may be altered or destroyed.
While there are estimated to be more than 6,000 known computer viruses, with three to five new ones being created daily, viruses basically fall into three categories. A boot sector virus spreads by hiding in the boot sector of your floppy disk and it latches on to your hard drive when you load or activate the floppy disk. Another is the file virus, which attach themselves onto other programs' executable files, such as those with the extensions .exe and .com.
A new strain of virus is called the Macro Virus, which infects files in applications such as Microsoft Word, a popular word processing program and Excel, a popular spreadsheet program. Macros are small programs created to repeat a particular task.
According to the National Computer Security Agency, Carlisle, Pa., a company which tracks computer viruses, the worldwide costs of detecting and recovering from computer viruses is estimitated at nearly $1 billion. And a NCSA/Dataquest, Inc., study found that while only one percent of computer viruses come via software, pre-loaded on to a new computer, the biggest culprit is disk sharing, which accounts for 65 percent of infected computers, seven percent from downloading and 25 percent from a computer network.
Experts caution that in order to avoid becoming a victim of computer viruses, you need to have an anti-virus software program on your computer and run it frequently. Another major way to avoid viruses is not to share disks or to at least run an anti-virus program on them.
While there are plenty of viruses lurking around, there is some computer behavior that is not virus-related.
Often some software has "bugs" which can make your computer act strangely and may result in system crashes, corrupted files and lost data. Computer malfunctions, such as your mouse suddenly not working, may be a hardware problem.
Some programs don't fit the technical definition of a virus, but can still cause damage to your computer. These virus variations include worms, which are programs that duplicate themselves, and while not infecting other programs, grow in size and can bring your computer to a halt; Trojan Horses, which are disguised as another computer program; and time bombs, which can go off on certain days, months or after so many keystrokes.
To find out more about computer viruses, check out these Web sites:
Anti-Virus Research Center
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/index.html
Anti-Virus Resources
http://www.hitchhikers.net/av.shtml
Virus Information
http://csrc.ncsl.nist.gov/virus/
Computer Virus Help Desk
http://iw1.indyweb.net/~cvhd/
McAfee Associates
http://www.mcafee.com/
National Computer Security Association
http://www.ncsa.com/
Symantec AntiVirus Research Center
http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/
Virus Bulletin Home Page
http://www.virusbtn.com/
Virus Info and Resource Page http://lipsmac.acs.unt.edu/Virus/index.html
Dr. Solomon's Computer Virus Information and More http://www.sands.com/ |
