catching viruses

the heck with av programs

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viruses and hosts

Whenever I hear someone complain about getting a virus, they always seem surprised that it happened. I'm not. Infecting a computer almost always the fault of the user.

A virus is a program. It needs to be loaded and run. A virus can't lurk in email (text) or in pictures. It either lurks in another program, or is a standalone program that you activate by double clicking it.

We wind up loading these programs for one of two reasons, laziness or greed.

greed

Greed. Con artists often rely on the greed of their victims. They involve the victim in some kind of phony quasi-legal activity while extracting cash from them. Many virus writers work this way. AOL4FREE was a virus (actually, a trojan horse) circulating a view years ago on the email circuit. The email promised the user that they could hack AOL with this program and use the service for free. If you were willing to get involved with this obvious illegal enterprise, you downloaded the program, ran it, and lost the hard drive (this is different from the actual AOL4FREE program that really did hack AOL!). That this program promised something free should have given pause to the sensible person, unless that person was overcome with the desire to get something for nothing by stealing from AOL. If you ignored the clear danger signs, double clicking the executable file ran the virus.

This reminds me of something a couple of my friends said to me in my youth. They would "hunt" birds with a pellet gun. Inevitably someone recoiled at this, and asked how could they do such a thing. They replied that when on these trips they were drunk, loud, obnoxious, and crashed insanely through the woods. Any bird that didn't fly away and sat still long enough for them to draw a bead deserved to be shot.

The I LOVE YOU or vbs/Loveletter virus is in the news. To my knowledge no one has commented on two really interesting things about the virus. One is that it has a very simple "disguise" to fool the more worldly among us. The file extension is .vbs, revealing it to be a program. But the virus was named LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT, which, to someone giving it a quick glance, made it look like a simple text file. The other thing interesting is that this virus revealed that people are so desperate for love that they are willing to open a file named I LOVE YOU sent by a total stranger.

laziness

Laziness. You stand a good chance of getting a virus by downloading software from questionable sites. Instead of looking for freeware and shareware from reputable places, or surfing the Web for another program that you would have to actually buy, users are willing to download anything from anywhere. It's no surprise that kids infect systems at an alarming rate, reflecting their craze for downloading.

You give yourself more than a fighting chance against viruses if you don't transfer floppies between machines. Taking floppies home from work instead of moving files across the Web is an invitation to disaster. Floppies are a notorious vehicle for virus transmission. Yes, floppies are convenient, but they are deadly. Take the time to zip and move large files in cyberspace instead of using a disk.

This goes for floppies from your friends. Your friends may not want to infect your machine, but theirs may be infected already. Let them move any files they have across the Web, either by FTP or email.

By the way, I do not run anti-virus on my machine. I keep my eyes open, don't even bother to open unsolicited email, never run a macro in a Word document from an unknown source, use a floppy from another machine, and never run executables from shady sources.

Now, this may be dangerous living to some, but remember that there is a question as to the usefulness of anti-virus programs. There has been some suspicion that they are not what they're cracked up to be. Specifically, the benchmarks of certain vendors have been questioned. Some argue that the real virus threat is not from old viruses - those have been purged from the computing world - but instead from new viruses that anti-virus programs will not be able to detect. One small note, the last two big heavy hitters, Melissa and Loveletter, were macros in Word documents, not infected or standalone executables. A quick user should have picked up the danger a mile away.