Do You Think You Have A Virus? We Can Help!

IT SW Merchant's trained technicians are experts at dealing with the detection and removal of today's most sophisticated and destructive computer viruses. As a home user a virus can be a nightmare. First your computer starts acting funny and then next thing you know it won't even boot up to Windows.

As a business owner, you cannot afford to have your business brought to a complete halt because of a virus infection. Your company's time is extremely valuable. Any down time due to a virus outbreak could cost your company a fortune. On top of that, your company's data files are critical to its operation. Any damage or loss to them as a result of being infected with a computer virus could set your company back years. We have seen companies loose as much as 10 years of irreplaceable engineering and financial data because their network got infected. DON'T LET THIS HAPPEN TO YOU!

If you suspect your company or home computer has been infected with a virus, please contact us now so we can look at your system and determine what is causing your problem. In most cases we can detect and safely remove the virus or viruses before they do irreparable harm to your system.
 

What is a Computer Virus?

     Computer viruses are called viruses because they share some of the traits of biological viruses. A computer virus passes from computer to computer like a biological virus passes from person to person. A biological virus is not a living thing. A virus is a fragment of DNA inside a protective jacket. Unlike a cell, a virus has no way to do anything or to reproduce by itself -- it is not alive. Instead, a biological virus must inject its DNA into a cell. The viral DNA then uses the cell's existing machinery to reproduce itself. In some cases, the cell fills with new viral particles until it bursts, releasing the virus. In other cases, the new virus particles bud off the cell one at a time, and the cell remains alive.

A computer virus shares some of these traits. A computer virus must piggyback on top of some other program or document in order to get executed. Once it is running, it is then able to infect other programs or documents. Obviously, the analogy between computer and biological viruses stretches things a bit, but there are enough similarities that the name sticks.

How They Spread

     Early viruses were pieces of code attached to a common program like a popular game or a popular word processor. A person might download an infected game from a bulletin board and run it. A virus like this is a small piece of code embedded in a larger, legitimate program.

Any virus is designed to run first when the legitimate program gets executed. The virus loads itself into memory and looks around to see if it can find any other programs on the disk. If it can find one, it modifies it to add the virus's code to the unsuspecting program. Then the virus launches the "real program." The user really has no way to know that the virus ever ran. Unfortunately, the virus has now reproduced itself, so two programs are infected. The next time either of those programs gets executed, they infect other programs, and the cycle continues. If one of the infected programs is given to another person on a floppy disk, or if it is uploaded to a bulletin board, then other programs get infected. This is how the virus spreads.

The spreading part is the infection phase of the virus. Viruses wouldn't be so violently despised if all they did was replicate themselves. Unfortunately, most viruses also have some sort of destructive attack phase where they do some damage. Some sort of trigger will activate the attack phase, and the virus will then "do something" -- anything from printing a silly message on the screen to erasing all of your data. The trigger might be a specific date, or the number of times the virus has been replicated, or something similar.

E-mail Viruses

     The latest thing in the world of computer viruses is the e-mail virus. They got their start in March 1999 with a virus called "Melissa". "Melissa" spread in Microsoft Word documents sent via e-mail, and it worked like this: Someone created the virus as a Word document and uploaded it to an Internet newsgroup. Anyone who downloaded the document and opened it would trigger the virus. The virus would then send the document (and therefore itself) in an e-mail message to the first 50 people in the person's address book. The e-mail message contained a friendly note that included the person's name, so the recipient would open the document thinking it was harmless. The virus would then create 50 new messages from the recipient's machine. As a result, the "Melissa" virus was the fastest-spreading virus ever seen! As mentioned earlier, it forced a number of large companies to shut down their e-mail systems.

The "ILOVEYOU" virus, which appeared on May 4, 2000, was even simpler. It contained a piece of code as an attachment. People who double-clicked on the attachment allowed the code to execute. The code sent copies of itself to everyone in the victim's address book and then started corrupting files on the victim's machine. This is as simple as a virus can get since the whole thing is human-powered. If a person double-clicks on the program that came as an attachment, then the program will run and do its thing. What fuels these viruses is the human willingness to double-click on the attached executable file.

What is a "Worm" Virus?

     A worm is a computer program that has the ability to copy itself from machine to machine. Worms normally move around and infect other machines through computer networks. Using a network, a worm can expand from a single copy incredibly quickly. For example, the "Code Red" worm replicated itself over 250,000 times in approximately nine hours on July 19, 2001. A worm usually exploits some sort of security hole in a piece of software or the operating system. For example, the "Slammer" worm (which caused mayhem in January 2003) exploited a hole in Microsoft's SQL Server software. The tiny yet powerful "Slammer" virus was only 376 bytes in size.

An Ounce of Prevention

     You can protect yourself against viruses with a few simple steps: If you are truly worried about traditional (as opposed to e-mail) viruses, you should be running a more secure operating system like UNIX. You never hear about viruses on these operating systems because the security features keep viruses (and unwanted human visitors) away from your hard disk.

If you are using an unsecured operating system such as any of the Microsoft Windows versions, then buying virus protection software is a nice safeguard. If you simply avoid programs from unknown sources (like the Internet), and instead stick with commercial software purchased on CDs, you eliminate almost all of the risk from traditional viruses.

In addition, you should disable floppy disk booting -- most computers now allow you to do this, and that will eliminate the risk of a boot sector virus coming in from a floppy disk accidentally left in the drive. You should make sure that Macro Virus Protection is enabled in all Microsoft applications, and you should NEVER run macros in a document unless you know what they do.

Furthermore, you should never double-click on an attachment that contains an executable file that arrives as an e-mail attachment. Attachments that come in as Word files (.DOC), spreadsheets (.XLS), images (.GIF and .JPG), etc., are data files and they can do no damage. A file with an extension like EXE, COM or VBS is an executable, and an executable can do any sort of damage it wants. Once you run it, you have given it permission to do anything on your machine. The only defense is to never run executable that arrive via e-mail.

By following those simple steps, you can help your computer remain virus free.