Sheree Russouw
Last year, as millions of people across the globe guzzled champagne and saluted the new century with rowdy renditions of Auld Lang Syne, the pervasive threat of Y2K was on their minds.
But the predictions of computer systems crashing worldwide on the eve of the millennium paled this year alongside a very real force bombarding computer users the virus.
Hot on the heels of the Melissa virus, modems have been warmed by the passage of viruses like the Love Bug (aka ILOVEYOU ), Sonic Worm, MyRomeo and Verona and their countless compatriots. The McAfee Avert Virus Information Library lists over 54 000 viruses, which have become a growing menace to information security.
“A virus is a tiny piece of software that is self-replicating. Once it processes the target of infection (other executable files) and you run these infected files, it hits you in a matter of milliseconds,” says Andre Post, a senior researcher at Symantec’s anti-virus research laboratory in The Netherlands.
His laboratory attempts to locate viruses as they spread and narrow them down to a specific location. They launch a counter-attack by analysing files and creating anti-virus definition software.
March’s Love Bug virus was the fastest-spreading virus yet seen. Powerful and reinforced by other viruses, this “worm” burrowed itself into e-mail, spreading as a chain letter.
Post says that the impact of the Love Bug virus was severely felt, especially when other virus coders got their hands on it. “What often happens with most of these viruses is that [crackers] take each others’ viral codes and just copy and paste it on to their virus. Sometimes the virus mutates and this mutation is malevolent and can be extremely damaging, while other viruses simply change by themselves.”
Now viruses are being evolved by cybervandals into “superviruses”. They can be triggered merely by you checking your e-mail inbox without even having specifically opened any infected attachments. Some, such as November’s Sonic Worm, open up “backdoors”, allowing a remote user access to infected computers.
“The effects of the virus depend on whether the virus is designed to damage. Let’s say that the mission of this kind of virus would be to format your hard drive for example. Other viruses are … created and distributed as a prank,” says Post.
A virus attack can clog up Internet traffic through the sheer numbers of e-mails forwarded from infected computers, putting substantial strain on the functioning of Internet service providers.
But while many viruses spread via e-mail, few do it unaided. Most are located in documents attached to e-mails, or in executable files that launch havoc when a user opens them. “Companies should have an e-mail policy with their staff. [Users] shouldn’t just double click on attachments and open them. Rather I would suggest that they go through a little bit more trouble by ensuring that the person who sent them the e-mail actually did,” says Post.
The first recorded virus was the “Brain” virus which attacked the infant personal computer world in 1986. Brain was considerably slower than today’s bugs, jumping from floppy disk to floppy disk.
The Internet, however, has empowered virus writers more than most of its users. Melissa and the Love Bug virus moved through the passages of e-mail address books, mass mailing like a crazed electronic postman on speed.
To a large extent, viruses also feed off the success of Microsoft. Because Windows inhabits the most desktops worldwide, it’s easy to predict the environment in which malevolent code will be working. Users of less popular operating systems such as Apple and Linux suffer practically no virus-related problems. They’re as vulnerable, but the virus writers are concentrating on Windows.
It was the impact of the Friday 13th virus and the Michelangelo virus of the early 1990s which succeeded in making people sit up and start installing anti-virus software. In the absence of more common-sense from the average PC user, anti-virus software remains the primary means of combat against infection.