About Viruses |
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| A virus is a mini software program written to cause
disruption or distraction of all your files on your hard drive. Some of these programs
will also infect the whole network.. The preferred mode of virus distribution is through
e-mail. It is usually in the form of an attachment. IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHO SENT YOU AN ATTACHMENT, DON'T OPEN IT!! You can also carry a virus from one computer to the next via a floppy disk, which contains an infected file. It pays to have an up to date anti virus software program installed on your computer. Here are our suggestions and warnings for running executables. The majority of all files have extensions. (doc, txt, xls, mdb, bmp, wav, etc) The problem is understanding what these attachments are. The most dangerous attachments: any EXE or COM file. Well, the most recent attacks have managed to appear as if they came from an acquaintance. You think the mail is from a friend, but it's the virus or worm program itself doing the actual sending. There's a huge security hole in many Microsoft mail products that lets this happen. You simply have to use good judgment when executing a file someone sent to you. I would personally verify with the sender before running an EXE file. It's a simple precaution. You should also be careful not to be tricked into opening a .JPEG or some other innocuous-looking file that's actually an executable. People in chat rooms trying to plant Trojan horses attempt this all the time. The file might be Mypic.jpg as far as you can tell, but it's actually Mypic.jpg.exe. If you've got your file extensions view turned off because that's the Windows default, you could be in trouble. Our advice: I. Make sure to see all your file extensions. Click on My Computer, then View, then Folder Options. Click on the View tab. You'll get a list of default settings that you'll want to look over and change. Unclick the Hide file extensions for known file types box under Files and Folders. Also, we recommend clicking on Show all files under the Hidden Files box further down on the list. II. Opening DOC files. DOC files can be programmed by using Visual Basic to do all sort of damage. The virus coder assumes you will open the file with Microsoft Word. If you use WordPad, there's no problem. Make sure you have WordPad installed on your system (it comes on a lot of Microsoft CDs). Then do the following: Click on My Computer, then View, then Folder Options, then the File Type tab. Go through the "registered file types" list until you find a reference to Word and DOC files. Usually this is listed under "Microsoft Word Documents." The bottom of the screen will say "Extension DOC" -- "Content type (MIME)" -- "opens with WORD." You want to change this to"opens with WordPad." The easiest way is to click on Remove. The next time you encounter a DOC file, the computer will ask you what you want to open it with and give you a list of suggestions in a dialog box. Click on WordPad if it is in the list. Otherwise, click on Other, browse to WordPad on the computer, and click on it. WordPad will then become the default, and it will read DOC files, ignoring macros. Some say if you turn up the security on Word you'll always be warned about macros. That's true, but it's still possible to write VB code that will bypass the warning. If you never installed Word, you'll find that the DOC file reader may already be set to WordPad. If you later install Microsoft Word or Office, that will change. Be careful. There's no easy fix for this problem despite repeated warnings to Microsoft. III. Taking files in chat rooms. Newbies like to download files from chat rooms or over IRC. Simple rule: Accept nothing other than a BMP, GIF, or JPEG file. Those are pictures. Anything else is a program or an INI file that can do damage. IV. Opening ZIP files. Only open ZIP files that have ZIP extension (as opposed to EXE). Some time back, the people producing unzipping software came up with a way to zip things into an EXE format. While practical, it's now dangerous to use. Get a good unzipping program. V. Run a virus checker often. |
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