It Is Contagious :: essays papers

It Is ContagiousTraces of the Stealth_c Virus have been found in memory. Reboot to a b ar system disc before continuing with this installation. This was themessage staring back at me from one of the computer monitors at my office.Questions raced through my mind. Stealth_c? Whats a system disk? Howam I supposed to install anti- virus software if the computer systemalready has a virus? As a discouraging feeling of impuissance came overme, I thought of all the people who had loaded something from disk on thisbox or who had used this box to access the Internet. Because there was novirus protection in the first place, it was going to be very difficult todetermine how many floppy disks and hard drives had been infected. Iwished I had versed about computer viruses a long time ago. What is acomputer virus, anyway? Is it a computer with a cold? A computer virusis called a virus because of three distinct similarities to a biologicalvirus. They are ? They must have the ability to make copie s of, orreplicate, itself. ? They must have a need for a host, or functionalprogram to which it can attach. ? The virus must do some kind of harm tothe computer system or at least cause some kind of unexpected or unwantedbehavior. Sometimes computer viruses just eat up memory or displayannoying messages, but the to a greater extent dangerous ones can destroy data, givefalse information, or completely freeze up a computer. The Stealth_c virusis a boot sector virus, meaning that it resides in the boot sectors of acomputer disk and loads into memory with the normal boot-up programs. Thestealth in the bring up comes from the capability of this virus to possiblyhide from anti-virus software. Virtually any media that can carrycomputer data can carry a virus. Computer viruses are usually spread bydata diskettes, but can be downloaded from the Internet, private bulletinboards, or over a local area network. This makes it extremely easy for avirus to spread once it has infected a system. T he aforementionedStealth_c virus was transported by the least likely avenue it waspackaged with commercial message software. This is an extremely rare occurrence,as most software companies go to great lengths to provide cleansoftware. There is a huge commercial interest in keeping computersvirus-free. Companies stand to lose literally thousands of dollars if theylose computer data to a virus. An immense amount of time can be lost frommore productive endeavors if someone has to check or clean each computer