Computer viruses are running rampant these days, and they show no sign of disappearing any time soon.
Spread like the flu, computer viruses infect one computer after another. Often it takes nothing more than the opening of an e-mail attachment to activate these small, nefarious programs.Viruses come in many forms. Macro, e-mail, and boot viruses are, next to worms and Trojan Horses, only a small subsection of the hordes of electronic invaders that can make life difficult for computer users today.Several hundred new viruses and virus variants are discovered every month. Only a small portion of these actually make it into circulation, and from them only two or three a month represent real danger.Around 50,000 viruses and their descendants have been identified up to this point. Realistically, only 200 or 300 are in wide distribution now.Large firms and government authorities dependent on e-mail traffic that are affected the most by viruses. It’s relatively uncommon for the pests to actually reach private users.In serious cases, top- shelf anti-virus software can often effectively limit the damage that viruses would otherwise cause. If files were damaged systematically, a restoration might last several hours.If absolutely nothing works any more, then the operating system and applications muse be reinstalled, a task that is time consuming at the least.The first unexplainable computer problem later attributed to a computer virus was discovered in 1982. It was a year after that when the term “computer virus” was coined. Further unrest was spread four years later through the “brain” virus.In subsequent years programmers became more and more creative with their viruses. They were able to store them in memory and render a computer inoperable.“The first anti-virus program, dubbed ‘Den Zuk’, was released in 1988,” says Gertrud Consoir, of antivirus software maker Symantec. The program was nevertheless helpless against the spread of the first Internet worms. Around 10 per cent of the 60,000 computers that were Net-ready at that time were affected.In addition to its advantages as a medium for communication, the Internet soon revealed a less appealing trait: its capacity for spreading infections. The first damaging agents were spread through discussion forums and later through chat rooms.In 1995, the first macro-type viruses infected computers and networks. They were particularly treacherous for their ability to simply attach themselves to a document. This made unnecessary the variety of files normally required for a virus to spread itself.In 1998, “W95.CHI” was the first virus to attack hardware as well as software. “Melissa” sent itself out from an infected PC through e- mail program to up to 50 further recipients and eventually led to the breakdown of many mail servers.“And almost three years ago in the merry month of May the “I Love You” virus lamed more than half a million systems within three days,” recalls Symantec’s expert Consoir.To compound the virus problem, Anyone can create their own viruses, using software such as the “Virus construction set,” first released in 1991. The virus construction set is essentially a toolbox that software authors can use to create viruses.This and other software toolboxes are freely available over the Internet. Michael Baehr, information technology director for Softline AG in Offenburg, Germany, once downloaded such a program off the Net and determined that 21 viruses were packed in along with the program itself.Today, viruses frequently take advantage of security gaps in the computer’s operating system. These gaps leave holes for destructive worms such as “Nimda”. Luckily, the Internet is today being used in the fight against such viruses. A variety of sites offer information on which viruses are dangerous.According to experts, only antivirus software is properly equipped to tackle these unwanted visitors. At predetermined intervals, antivirus programs search through a computer’s hard drive and memory to locate viruses and put them into quarantine.After a virus scan has been completed, the affected files can then be cleansed, usually without problem.Antivirus programs also can keep track of data transferred to and from the Internet and sound the alarm if something seems fishy.Of course, if the virus protection gets too old or a given virus is too new, problems can pop up in spite of the antivirus software.When a new virus comes along, everyone is unprotected at first. That means that ultimately, it’s the user’s responsibility to the check in as often as possible with the antivirus manufacturer to find out if updates are available and to actually download them.Some antivirus programs are able to update themselves on their own when the Internet is accessed. That said, there is no silver bullet for virus attacks. The cleverest virus programmers seem always a step ahead of their antivirus programmer opponents.
