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Message 242 of 250 TITLED: Viruses
BY: Jeff Washburn [#21] TO: All
On 07/08/88 around 10:54:29
T E L E C O M M U N I C A T I O N S
Safe telecommunicating may
be your best protection
against viruses.
BY: Michael Fischer
Taken from: A+, August 1988, Pp. 81
We are all familiar with Apple II programs that have bugs, but - until recently - very few of us had heard of viruses, programs that intentionally
cause your computer to malfunction.
Viruses have recently been reported in Macintosh and MS-DOS systems. There
has been alot of talk about a ProDOS-based Apple II virus, although no one has yet confirmed its existance. Nevertheless, you should understand what a virus is so that you can better prepare yourself for the day one might infect your
computer.
A computer virus is a program fragment that attaches itself to operating
systems on other disks in your system and, if you trade programs with others,
sometimes to their operating systems as well.
As with its counterpart in humans, the virus spreads in a largely undetected - and undetectable - manner until it is ready to do its damage. The most damaging
viruses, when they do appear, destroy data, wiping out an entire hard disk.
If you don't have a back-up (preferably one from before the infection of your system), you stand to loose megabytes of data.
Unlike its human counterpart, a computer virus cannot be created without a malicious motive. The person who releases a computer virus obviously doesn't
care about other computer users. This is not the stuff of which heroes are made.
Viruses often spread on telecommunications systems, when people trade programs. In the Macintosh wolrd, a virus was spread on both GEnie and
CompuServe and eventually found its way onto the disks distributed by the Aldus Corporation. That virus was originally contained in a public-domain Hyper-Card
stack that purported to discuss products that Apple had not yet announced.
The virus flashed a screen message on a particular date and then deleted
itself. Although it was not seriously harmful, the virus was an invasion and is reported to have caused problems with certain programs while it was present.
There are confirmed reports of destructive IBM viruses too. Some of these programs apparently destroy data files or the entire contents of a hard-disk
drive.
To date, however, no case of a virus has cropped up on an Apple II program
on any of the major national sevices such as GEnie, CompuServe, Delphi, BIX,
ems. Some people claim that they know whose disks have been
erased. People have mentioned that several programs may be infected, one of which is a bogus version of a prerelease commercial program.
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