Ryan McDonnell

Info Tech 110

7/10/99

omputer viruses were first designed in the early seventies. Ever since, they have been wrecking havoc on more and more computers across the planet. For some, there seems to be no cure, they keep going and going, spreading their terrible disease wherever they can. A computer virus is a program which infects other programs by altering them to include a copy of itself. They typically contain instructions to re-format hard drives, corrupt data, cause annoyances or all four. Viruses can even spread through a system or entire network, infecting different parts of the operating system and application programs as they run amuk. A virus could be considered a combination of a worm and trojan horse because of the way it seeks out executable files and copies itself onto them and performs often disasteruosly fatal tasks.

• Worm: Worms are programs whose purpose is to reproduce. A worm will copy itself into multiple directories and onto any disk that it can crawl onto.

• Trojan Horse: A Trojan horse is a section of code which hides itself inside an application program which then performs some secret action. Some examples: games, utilities, and applications.

iruses such as worms and Trojan horses (See: Table 1) are all over the Internet and online services. Their primary purpose is to destroy and concour unsuspecting targets, such as your home computer!

1. Important Ways You Can Avoid Getting A Virus:

• Do not bring unscanned floppy disks into the Computer Lab.
• Write-protect original floppy disks.
• Use a virus scan to check all disks before using them. Be extra careful with software from Bulletin Boards and from other outside sources.
• Do NOT use "hacked" or bootleg software. You never know what could be on the disk.
• Don’t ever boot-up from floppy disks that you have used in the labs. If there is a virus on them, you could infect another computer.