It Is Contagious :: essays papers

It Is Contagious "Traces of the Stealth_c Virus have been found in memory. Reboot to a clean system disk before continuing with this installation." This was the message staring back at me from one of the computer monitors at my office. Questions raced through my mind. "Stealth_c?" "What's a system disk?" "How am I supposed to install anti-virus software if the computer system already has a virus?" As a discouraging feeling of helplessness came over me, I thought of all the people who had loaded something from disk on this box or who had used this box to access the Internet. Because there was no virus protection in the first place, it was going to be very difficult to determine how many floppy disks and hard drives had been infected. I wished I had learned about computer viruses a long time ago. What is a computer virus, anyway? Is it a computer with a cold? A computer "virus" is called a virus because of three distinct similarities to a biological virus. They are: ? They must have the ability to make copies of, or replicate, itself. ? They must have a need for a "host," or functional program to which it can attach. ? The virus must do some kind of harm to the computer system or at least cause some kind of unexpected or unwanted behavior. Sometimes computer viruses just eat up memory or display annoying messages, but the more dangerous ones can destroy data, give false information, or completely freeze up a computer. The Stealth_c virus is a boot sector virus, meaning that it resides in the boot sectors of a computer disk and loads into memory with the normal boot-up programs. The "stealth" in the name comes from the capability of this virus to possibly hide from anti-virus software. Virtually any media that can carry computer data can carry a virus. Computer viruses are usually spread by data diskettes, but can be downloaded from the Internet, private bulletin boards, or over a local area network. This makes it extremely easy for a virus to spread once it has infected a system. The aforementioned Stealth_c virus was transported by the least likely avenue; it was packaged with commercial software. This is an extremely rare occurrence, as most software companies go to great lengths to provide "clean" software. There is a huge commercial interest in keeping computers virus-free. Companies stand to lose literally thousands of dollars if they lose computer data to a virus. An immense amount of time can be lost from more productive endeavors if someone has to check or clean each computer