Tim Phillips
The annual computer virus season began last month and the next few weeks will be filled with new viruses with lurid names.
But at least three of these -Valentine Greetings, Penpal Greetings and Join the Crew – are hoaxes. Michelangelo and Jerusalem – two of the most feared viruses in the history of the PC – are virtually extinct outside the researcher’s lab. Ghost, the screensaver once feared as a PC destroyer, has been branded “just cute” by the United States Energy Department’s virus watchdog. The fear of viruses has long since outstripped the risk of harm from them.
Far from escalating out of control, the virus problem is containable, provided users buy basic anti-virus software or use common sense. If you don’t share other people’s word processor files or download programs from the Internet, it is almost impossible to catch a virus.
Now the bigger threat seems to be from virus hoaxes: e-mail messages claiming to be circulars from virus experts, panicking users with threats that, for example, their processors may be plunged into an “nth complexity infinite loop” if they read a mail message with the subject “good times”. Technically speaking, it’s as likely to happen as the computer turning into a bus. But if anti-virus companies have their phone lines clogged by false alarms, says one of the US’s leading virus experts, Rob Rosenberger, they only have themselves to blame.
Rosenberger traces public panic over viruses to wild predictions of disaster made by the anti-virus industry in the early 1990s, and reported by a sensation- hungry press – especially over the first Michelangelo virus attack in 1992. “A few fear-mongers knew that the publicity would sell anti-virus software, so they were willing to lower themselves to provide those quotes.”
Rosenberger’s wrath is reserved for John McAfee, now out of the industry. In 1992, while running the anti-virus software company that bore his name (since renamed Network Associates), McAfee predicted on CNN that a single virus could destroy five million PCs if the users didn’t buy anti- virus software. At best, the prediction was a wild exaggeration. But, Rosenberger says, the software companies still overstate the risks from viruses. “They have to sell software,” he laughs. “Fear sells.”
Didier Guibal, European vice-president of Network Associates, rejects the accusation that McAfee hyped the problem to sell software. “There are between 200 and 400 new viruses every month, and two or three hoaxes a year.” But while new viruses are constantly emerging – anti-virus software vendor Dr Solomon’s estimates there are about 19 000 different viruses in existence – only about 200 have ever actually spread, Rosenberger says. “The rest just exist in anti-virus research labs.”
According to Rosenberger, the problem for virus writers is that for a virus to spread, it cannot destroy its host computer, “so most viruses are pretty innocuous”. The exception, he admits, are macro-viruses. These have appeared in the last three years, and are small programs that attach to documents, almost all of them Microsoft Word or Excel. When you copy the document, you copy the virus – so if you send a Word file as an e-mail attachment, you can transmit the virus. Macro-viruses now account for four out of five new viruses. A few are subtly destructive, but they cannot attach themselves to ordinary text e-mail.