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The following articles are published here with the permission of the author as general information to fellow computer users and enthusiasts. I hope the information presented here is helpful in allowing you to avoid both the hoax and real viruses as well as the other hoaxes. There are links to other sites on the web which deal with Virus Scares and Other Hoaxes which seem to propagate periodically by e-mail. The articles replicated below provide links to some of these sites. This trash clutters the network with useless trash much like those who originate it populate the world with human(?) trash. It is my hope to provide enough knowledge to allow those who are at least minimally thoughtful to avoid these hoaxes and to some degree frustrate the mindless jerks who initiate this garbage! I only wish there was a simple way to return a thousandfold to each of these jerks copies of his own garbage and keep him off-line permanently trying to cope with his own stupidity.

We all know about computer viruses, and many people are quite worried about them, but they are not really dangerous if you understand them and take reasonable precautions.

E-Mail Viruses

I'm sure you have all received e-mails warning you of dire consequences if you read an e-mail whose subject is "Good News!" or "AOL4FREE" or something like that. These are hoaxes intended to damage free communication by making people afraid to use e-mail. When you consider the time wasted reading and forwarding such things, they are as destructive as the real thing.

It is not possible -- NOT POSSIBLE -- to get a virus by just reading an e-mail, unless the e-mail contains a macro or attachment that you then execute.

Here are two simple rules that, if followed, will protect you from any e-mailed virus:

1. If you ever read a mail message and you get a warning that alerts you that the mail contains macros, make sure that you select the option to disable macros before you continue.
   
   
2. If you ever receive a mail message from someone you do not know and that mail contains an attachment, do not open the attachment till you have made sure the attachment does not contain a virus. There are programs on the market that can be used to check such things.
   
   

You should also be aware that both Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word have a built-in macro checker that will alert you to the existence of a macro in a file that you open as long as you do not disable this function.

The next time you get one of these hoaxes, instead of forwarding it, please reply to it with this article.

Sources of Viruses

Computer viruses are not as common as most people believe, and rather easy to avoid. Commercial software on commercial CD-ROMs is almost guaranteed to be virus-free, but any software on floppy disks or non-commercial CDs can be a risk. Anyone can make floppies and non-commercial CDs, and can put anything they want on them. It doesn't matter who wrote the program; someone else can add to it or alter it. Commercial CDs have data, usually the name of the company that burns the CDs, burned into the inside track and visible to the naked eye. Recordable CDs lack this, and usually have a batch number on the unsilvered area of the hub. Be wary of any CD that lacks this identification, and certainly of anything with a stick-on label. Of course, even a commercial CD could be infected, since a criminal could hack into the manufacturer's system and plant a virus before the CD master is made, but this is extremely unlikely.

By far the most common source of a virus infection is downloaded software. Anything downloaded can be infected, even from big, reliable, long-established companies. It's not easy for criminals to break into such systems, and it certainly is very rare, but it has been done. A public bulletin board (BBS) is probably the easiest place to plant a virus. A good Sysop (the System Operator for the BBS) can keep the BBS clean, but some are careless.

Some viruses attach themselves to programs on the infected system, and are transmitted to other systems when the programs are copied. If a friend gives you a copy of a program, check it for a virus, even if you trust your friend; his system may be infected.

Protection

It is a good idea to have an anti-virus program; they are cheap, easy to use, and easy to keep updated. You do have to keep getting the updates, because these programs use an anti-virus database to recognize viruses, and this database must be upgraded when new viruses are discovered. Sometimes an anti-virus program will interfere with the installation of new software, especially if you are installing a Service Pack. That means you should disable the anti-virus when installing new software, but that leaves you unprotected should there be a virus. What now?

The best defense is to have a test machine, not on a network, not connected to anything else. You disable the anti-virus on the test machine, load the new software, then start the anti-virus and test. Once you have established that the software is clean, you can load it onto your production system.

OK, most of us can't afford to have a machine we only use for virus checking. The next best solution is a test disk. On my home machine, Disk 0 is a 2GB IDE disk, with two 1GB partitions. The first is a secondary Windows NT installation which I use to repair my primary system partition as needed. The other partition has Windows NT installed, but the disk configuration only sees the two partitions on Drive 0. I boot to it and do virus checks. I figure the worst a virus can do is wipe out the two partitions on Disk 0, and they are easily rebuilt.

Naturally no system or procedure can guarantee absolute safety. If you are reasonably careful, use an anti-virus, always virus-check new software, and keep your backups updated, you should never have any significant trouble from a virus.

For more data on virus hoaxes, try these sites:

http://kumite.com/myths/home.htm

http://sassman.net/virus/

Lance Jensen
Technical Support Manager
Executive Software* International, Inc.

^© 1998 Executive Software International, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Thank you all for the feedback on these articles. Besides giving us an idea of what subjects you need and want covered, the success stories of how the data helped are always warming! We answer as many replies as we can, but with a subscription list of over 200,000 and many sites reprinting the articles, we can't answer them all. I apologize to those of you I have not answered, and I will try to catch up! Two recent articles prompted very many similar replies, so this article will be used to answer them.

E-Mail Viruses

I received many replies pointing out that there was a danger from a buffer overflow in certain programs (Netscape Communicator 4.0 prior to 4.06 and Microsoft Outlook were mentioned). Though there are no actual reported cases of such a virus, it was possible for an e-mail to be designed to overflow a buffer and allow a virus or other program to be planted.

This is true, and I thank you for pointing it out. It would have been better if I had covered this aspect in the original article.

It is possible to transmit a virus and infect a computer by means of an e-mail message. However, what I am saying is that if you take the proper precautions, then you cannot infect your system by reading an e-mail. If you received a virus that took advantage of the buffer overflow bug, it might infect your system on receipt or on being displayed in your mail inbox. By the time you opened the message, the damage would have been done.

E-mail chain-letters warning about viruses do no good. They do damage in that they waste the time of the senders and the receivers, and they scare people and reduce their willingness to communicate. In that sense, they sabotage the internet. The proper action to take on receiving such a chain-letter is to reply to the sender, not to forward the letter. You may send them the Handling Viruses article and this one, as long as you don't alter the articles. They are, after all, copyrighted.

You can also investigate the alleged viruses yourself at this web site:

http://sassman.net/virus/

They contain good data on many real viruses as well as specific hoaxes.

And here is a special one:

http://www.hoaxkill.com/

These folks not only have a list of known hoaxes, but if you can't find one on the list, you can e-mail it to hoaxcheck@hoaxkill.com , and they will check it out.

Precautions

An e-mail can carry a virus as an attachment. I never open an attachment that is not text unless I have checked it or had it checked for a virus.

An e-mail can carry a virus in a macro. If you set up your word processor to ask you before enabling macros and always select "no", you become immune to this form of attack.

An e-mail can carry a virus in HTML and Visual Basic scripting. This is very similar to the macros; it is essentially attaching a program to the e-mail. Simply turning off the script execution capability of your browser or word processor stops these viruses.

Note that you can always enable the macros or script execution for any message once you have satisfied yourself that it is clean.

What? Me wrong?

In the article Converting FAT to NTFS I described the Boot partition, where the boot record is found, and the System partition, where the Windows NT files reside. I was told that I had it backwards, that Microsoft officially named them the other way around. This made no sense to me, but I checked up and sure enough, I was wrong! The System partition is where the boot files are located; the Boot partition contains the Windows NT files.

You can see the value of your feedback. Please keep it coming!

Lance Jensen
Technical Support Manager
Executive Software* International, Inc.

^© 1998 Executive Software International, Inc. All Rights reserved.

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