THAT MEAN OLD VIRUS      by Dan Mitzimberg |||| RETURN |||| I can't believe some people. Anyone who would want to create the problems viruses create can't be all there. If not there, where? I ask myself that every time I hear of a new virus that is attaching itself to your email and sending itself to all of your friends. 'Hello, I'm a virus. Please open me.' How do you thank your friends? Actually, the virus will send itself back to you, the sender. Thanks. Viruses come in many different packages. The ones we hate the most are the viruses that attach to your email and then open a worm when you reboot. The worm? It seems to like to roam around programs that are running in the background – but who knows for sure – when it starts to mess with your registry, that's it. Format. We hate these because they attack us at home. We can format the drive and in few hours be up and running. The real dangerous ones are to the Internet. They can stop the Internet dead in cyberspace. The Code Red virus was a cute one; it spread within the Microsoft IIS servers. At first it didn't seem to infect more than about 18 to 20 thousand (about 10%) of the Microsoft servers it was trying to target. At that time it was getting cleaned up about as fast as it was spreading. Then a few days later it opened up and hit about 350k servers in under 14 hours. More than half of the servers were bottle necked with requests, thousands and thousands per second. The bandwidth was clogged with useless requests. It was like the Code Red programmer found a glitch in his/her virus and released it with a vengeance. It worked its way into the government computers. I think that was the main plan anyway, confuse us and then head for the target. It was almost military in approach. I doubt that it had the result the programmer was looking for. So I am sure it will come forward again, and soon. A virus programmer's favorite trick is to place FREE software on the Internet that claims to do great things, like clean up viruses. In fact, they cause much more damage. They could be sending the programmer information back to them without you knowing it. You could loose credit card and personal information to this person. This is one reason I always suggest using a creditable software company like Norton or McAfee. This (viruses) has become the new terrorist action of the millennia. The people writing them seem to want to get back at someone in the government or maybe Microsoft. Why? What good does it do to cripple the government for only a few hours? The hackers never thought of redundancy. My best advice to our personal attacks from viruses – is – to find a virus protection program that does what you want it to. I do suggest using a major brand name: Norton and McAfee are a few. Each has features that are unique to their software. Check out each and find the one that suits you. They both do a great job of locating and inoculating viruses. Now for the people writing the viruses. Unless you have stock in virus protection software companies, you are stupid. They are the only ones profiting from your actions. Virus programmers have cost the consumer millions upon millions of dollars from their actions. These viruses cause a bit of damage to a network system that is really still in its infancy. The Internet is still very young and is growing at a rate that would make bamboo jealous. It is very important to get viruses under control, just think what damage would be caused in four or five years from now. You could easily multiply the Code Red virus by 10 to the 12th power. If you are interested in more information about viruses and how to best cure them, view the Internet watch for viruses. Visit www.incidents.org to find out more. dan