There’s a virus going around. In fact there’s more than one. But don’t worry; these viruses don’t infect people–they infect computers.
Just a couple of weeks ago there was a flurry of excitement surrounding one such virus, a flurry that may be repeated in a few more days. This virus, called Hare, activates itself on August 22 or September 22. If your computer’s got it, it will display the message “HDEuthanasia” by Demon Emperor: Hare Krsna, hare, hare…” The virus will then overwrite all your hard disks on your computer, destroying all your data.
On the other hand, maybe you should worry.
Lots of people do, because we’re so dependent on computers these days that anything that seriously affects computers can seriously affect us. And so, when computers are infected with viruses, people, too, suffer symptoms.
But what exactly is a computer virus?
One definition, provided by Symantec Corporation (which makes a large part of its business fighting viruses) is, “A parasitic program written intentionally to enter a computer without the user’s permission or knowledge.” It’s called parasitic because, in order to get inside the computer, it attaches itself to some other type of program or file. Whenever that program or file is activated, the virus replicates itself.
Some viruses don’t do much else, which makes them more of a nuisance than destructive; they just eat up disk space and memory. But others are more active. Some of them just display a message on the screen on a particular date. Others can affect performance. And still others can cause the whole system to close down; a serious matter if that system is performing some vital task like processing income tax forms. (Okay, bad example.)
Viruses are a fact of life today. Large corporations are frequently infected on a monthly basis. But this annoying and costly situation (virus infection is estimated to cost business more than $2 billion U.S. a year) is relatively new; just a decade ago, there were no computer viruses.
The first viruses were created in university laboratories to demonstrate that there was a “potential” threat. By 1987, “wild” viruses began showing up at universities around the world. Three of the most common viruses, called Stoned, Cascade and Friday the 13th, first appeared in ’87.
In those days, a new virus appeared only once every three months. By 1989 a new virus appeared every week. By 1990, the rate was once every two days. Today, three new viruses appear every day–an average of 110 new viruses a month. Which means there are thousands of them out there.
Who’s creating them? Traditionally, it’s been teenage boys, who often quit in their 20s when, in the words of Fridrik Skulason, president of Frisk Software International, “they grow up, get a girlfriend or a real job.”
But today, there are more and more older virus writers, in their 20s and 30s. They’re more experienced and have better equipment, and so the viruses they’re writing are more sophisticated. The risk of infection has gone up, too, because so many computers are closely linked via networks and the Internet.
The best way to avoid viruses is to stay away from possible sources–but sometimes that’s not possible. If you need a file, you need a file, and you’ve got no way to know, until it’s on your computer, whether or not it’s carrying a virus. If it is, you’d better have good anti-viral software installed.
Anti-viral software scans all the drives on your computer for the telltale repeating segments of programming code that identify a virus, and remove it–if it’s a virus that has been analyzed by the software’s authors. Viruses are really very simple pieces of programming, and a skilled anti-viral programmer can create a disinfectant program in a matter of a few hours.
But so many new and more sophisticated viruses are appearing that anti-viral programmers are in danger of being overwhelmed. For that reason, they’re now trying to automate the anti-viral process, to develop software that can analyze and destroy previously unknown viruses without the help of a human programmer.
You could say the goal is to create an active immune system for computers, instead of requiring a new vaccination for every disease that comes along.
Unfortunately, you can bet that right now there’s a virus writer somewhere already trying to figure out how to fool such a system.
The struggle against viruses is a never-ending battle.
It’s bad enough we have to worry about our own health; for the foreseeable future, we’re going to have to worry about our computers’ health, too.
