DEALING WITH VIRAL INFECTION

Posted by Charles on August 07, 2002 at 10:59:06:

DEALING WITH VIRAL INFECTION

By CHARLES
Tue 6 August 2002 © 2002 BNN – Britong Noodle News. All Rights Reserved

Continuing our theme of making Britong a better place to live, work and play in; let me share my experience on handling computer viruses with you the Jabbers and Jabberesses of the free world. Previously, some of our celebrity contributors have given reminders and shared information on the menace of computer viruses. I do hope that by also doing so, I would not be branded by some quarters as a Neo-Britanica being ‘fooked’ (a new term introduced in Austin Powers’ latest movie). All I’m hoping for is that our britonging, surfing and computer experience will not only be as smooth as silk but also as smooth as a shaven cat!!

As we all know computer viruses are programs that are written with bad intentions – to crash or disrupt our computer applications and operations; and make life difficult for us the end-users. Different variants, strains and clans of malicious computer programs or viruses exist – there are worms, Trojan horses and even those web crawlers, snoopers and cookies are not really as innocent as they sound. Notorious viruses in recent memory include ‘Melissa’ (originated from the US), ‘CIH’ (Taiwan), ‘I Love You’ (The Philippines), ‘Navidad’ (South/Latin America?) and the various strains of the W32 and password worms.

In the early days of personal computing, the more promiscuous among us would most probably be infected by computer viruses through the exchange and sharing of files, diskettes and computer systems. These days you people are very vulnerable to viral attacks and other contagious diseases of cyberspace through your lifestyle of unprotected net surfing, britonging, file and program downloading without firewalls, cyber nannies and e-french caps. In the early days of the net, there were simple computer programs known as cookies that were used by software and hardware manufacturers to get relevant information from our PC system; and then used either to change the settings for correct operation or surveying. With these functions, these software cookies have become the forerunners of the present net-distributed viruses. Now, the software cookies have mutated and advanced to become web-crawlers – being used by corporations and governments, whether they admit it or not, to snoop on users and systems by gathering information for user-profiling, market surveying and remote system monitoring a.k.a. spying. Yes, the scenario and possibility are far more intriguing and scary than we dare to think.

The most obvious or traditional defence against computer virus attacks is of course to detect and kill or neutralise the virus by installing anti-virus programs such as Norton Anti-Virus (NAV), McAfee (not to be confused with our Britong fraternity’s Ian McGhee) and the newer but increasingly popular AVG (from Grisoft at http://www.grisoft.com). And other sources also can. In the early days of the net it was standard and safe practice to scan files on our diskettes and hard disks before opening or using them. At that time the viruses could be detected, killed or quarantined easily as they are based on standard programming rules of being activated by the hitting of certain keyboard keys or their combinations; or set to strike at a certain time by the onboard clock. Some of the viruses were harmless but irritating, like sending out greetings on the DOS-based monitor screen on Valentine’s Day or Christmas day. Also, in those days such anti-virus software versions could be effective for quite sometime – up to a year; and fit nicely on a single floppy disk. Now, the creation and spreading of newer viruses are happening at a faster rate and thus the anti-virus programs are also being upgraded regularly by the distributors to keep up with the progress. The sophistication and scope of damage by the new viruses also increase by the day. Apart from producing logical damages that could be corrected like file deletion and operating system hang-up, modern viruses could cause physical damages that are serious and beyond repair like crashing of the hard disk. So to keep up and stay protected, or ensure partial protection, from the latest computer viruses, we need to get or download the latest releases or patches for the anti-virus programs. And of course, we need to keep in mind that to protect their image and profession, virus writers are always a few steps ahead of the anti-virus program writers.

The anti-virus programs or software vaccines must be used with caution as they are what are known in computerese as terminate-and-stay-resident (TSR) programs. Such programs are always monitoring your operating system’s operations even if you close them or being led to believe that their monitoring mode have been switched off. This interferes with the settings and operations and occasionally leads to hang-ups and illegal function call messages. When this happens, the effect and consequence is no different from that of installing a smart-ash computer game – it will always try to change the default setting of your Windows operating system to suit the video card or processor and memory requirements; in the process causing havoc and affecting the operations of other programs. So this is a classic case of introducing more problems when we try to solve one problem.

By safely assuming that at present the majority of virus attacks and infections come from the internet, here are some tips on how to avoid or deal with such viral nuisances and irritations:

- do not be so promiscuous in emailing – read only messages from those you are familiar with

- do not open or read attachments of email messages that the sources you are not sure of, certainly not the unsolicited mail (nicer term ‘junk mail’) – they might contain the macros of virus programs

- ignore messages without titles even from those whom you are familiar with – they could be automatically generated and sent by virus-infected mail from the mailing list of your innocent sender

- avoid using, especially during viral epidemics if you can, popular email programs like Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express as they are favourite targets for virus writers; and go for other easily-available alternatives like Eudora, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail (but this one from Microsoft also now)

- downloadable freebies like wallpapers, screen savers, cute icons and other software gadgets might not be that innocent – they could contain information gathering routines by the distributors (under the pretext of market surveying by a corporation or the state – like in Singapore a few years ago) and which could be utilized by virus writers

- try to resist the temptation of the sophisticated sex sites. Yes, these sites are very advanced and exhibited the latest multimedia technology combined with dazzling creativity. Good excuse for being there if you are into multimedia technology or techno music, but not if otherwise because what do you get after you faithfully follow their webmasters’ instructions and maybe even parting with your plastic money? At least Adam gets to eat the apple in the Garden of Eden and has the naked and smooth Eve for company. Once again, please resist the temptations and sweet promises and invitations of webmasters from that side of cyberspace. Organise a trip to Prahokland if the real thing is what you are looking for.

However, similar to their biological cousins, sometimes we just have to live with these computer viruses and their 1,001 irritating strains. And for certain damages and irritations we can and will become immune to them. For example, at one time my MS Word document files were infected during an epidemic. The files that I worked on will just expand in size when I perform certain operations – inserting and editing a certain object in particular (MS Equation). After a few inserting and editing operations the file will balloon to a ridiculous size that uses up all available RAM and beyond the capacity of a 1.44 MB (megabyte) floppy disk. At that time I could not do anything except swear profanities like ‘try ndo-ih!!’ (not me, but someone else had introduced this smashing term a long time ago in Britongland, please forgive him). Then I realised that when I copied (or Copy and Paste to be more Windows-precise) an infected big file into a new file, the size of the saved new file is much smaller and surprisingly reasonable. The clean state of the new file is also indicated by the absence of a red capital X (as in Kittie’s signature line X) on a book writing icon at the bottom indicator bar of MS Word. I will then repeat this process each time I notice that a file size has expanded unreasonably. Thus, a safe practice of always saving the previous versions of a project file has brought an added advantage of virus cleaning. Parallel lessons in real life? It’s good to be born anew and start with a clean slate as requested by some Jabbers. Then we’ll have a good cause for house warming, spring-cleaning or whatever.

I’m sure there is a lot to discuss about computer viruses and other aspects of information technology that are increasingly creeping into our daily lives. Lots could be shared and a computer system as we know it now is such a complicated but still manageable beast, unlike the rough seas and oceans of PG’s fishing world. So to end my piece, all I want to add is that there are simple rules on maintenance and servicing that we could follow to make our computing life less irritating. On the contrary, these practices should make our computing life more meaningful, productive, exciting, invigorating and once again to misquote PG - ‘as smooth as a shaven cat’. But one thing is for sure though – NEVER EVER service your motherboard or lubricate your processor with ghee. It just won’t work because the viscosity coefficient of ghee is little bit on the high side.

© 2002 BNN – Britong Noodle News. All Rights Reserved.