If you’re like many of us, it isn’t hard to get into the mood to give your computer a thorough cleaning — and I don’t mean with spray disinfectant. Rather, I mean that it’s time to go cloak-and-dagger and check for spyware on your computer. Spyware can be a lot of things. In general, it’s … Read more
There are some tools and procedures that can tell with 99.44 percent accuracy whether your computer has a virus. Here are the actions to take: Find out whether your computer has antivirus software: Find out whether your antivirus software is up to date: If you already have antivirus software installed on your computer. … Read more
Stalking the wild computer virus starts with observation: There are a lot of ways that a computer can begin to act strangely for no apparent reason. These changes in behavior may be the result of a virus, but there are other possible explanations as well. This article describes some typical virus-induced symptoms, as well as … Read more
Viruses are written in assembly language. High level languages like Basic, C, and Pascal have been designed to generate stand-alone programs, but the assumptions made by these lan- guages render them almost useless when writing viruses. They are simply incapable of performing the acrobatics required for a virus to jump from one host program to … Read more
Every viable computer virus must have at least two basic parts, or subroutines, if it is even to be called a virus. Firstly, it must contain a search routine, which locates new files or new areas on disk which are worthwhile targets for infection. This routine will determine how well the virus reproduces, e.g., whether … Read more
Computer viruses can be classified into several different types. The first and most common type is the virus which infects any application program. On IBM PC’s and clones running under PC-DOS or MS-DOS, most programs and data which do not belong to the operating system itself are stored as files. Each file has a file … Read more
A plethora of negative magazine articles and books have catalyzed a new kind of hypochondria among computer users: an unreasonable fear of computer viruses. This hypochondria is possible because a) computers are very complex machines which will often behave in ways which are not obvious to the average user, and b) computer viruses are still … Read more