Virus Alert! What you can do to protect yourself (and the World).

May 19, 2000 – Heads up folks! There is a new Virus making headlines this morning and it is even nastier than the first! Let me explain a bit about the last nasty attack and how to protect yourself (and others) from viral attacks.

May 4th, the world was treated to a glimpse of the future of cyber-terrorism. The ILOVEYOU bug, which ended up causing over 7 BILLION dollars worth of damage worldwide, replicated by sending itself to every address in the recipient's address book in the Windows version of Outlook, Microsoft's e-mail program (which is apparently heavily used in Government offices worldwide). This tied up networks with the shear volume of traffic. More significantly, it also overwrote web related file formats, causing those without recent back-ups some serious headaches.

This virus also crossed the normal platform barrier. Macintosh users are normally fairly immune to viruses written for Windows, with the exception of MSWord Macro Viruses. This was not the case this time. While Mac users could not infect themselves or other computers (since Outlook for the Mac uses Applescript and not Visual Basic Script), they could be infected through networks (sort of).

"The malicious code is a hybrid virus and worm. Like the Melissa and Explore.Zip worms, it propagates itself through networks -- in this case, e-mail. But unlike those two, it also destroys and replicates itself by manipulating files, in this case JPEG and MP3 files on a user's hard drive, like a traditional virus." CNN Online

What is scary about this little attack is that it was not a very sophisticated virus, and it could have been a lot worse. Enter today's new virus:

This new virus, dubbed "Herbie: The Love Bug II, attacks text files, changing the name, adding the .vbs extension, and sets the file size to 0, in effect deleting the contents of the file.

Anti-Virus software manufacturers, like Symantec (Norton Antivirus) and McAfee (Dr. Solomon's and VirusScan), have posted updates to their anti-virus applications.

So how can you help stop this virus in its tracks and protect your data?

1. Never open any attachment sent to you, even from a known sender, unless you are expecting it.

2. Never open an attachment with a .VBS filename extension.

3. Since this new virus changes the subject line of an e-mail, it is best to nix any attachments with the vbs extension, even if the e-mail appears to be from a friend.

4. Remember that it is possible to reinfect yourself! Delete infected files, and replace them from back-ups (yet another reason to make frequent back-ups!)

This new virus may mean that infection could mean reformatting your hard drive and reinstalling the system software (like Windows or the MacOS) and any other software and files on your computer, just to get working again.

5. Back up frequently! It may mean the difference between having the ability to get back to work quickly, or having to rebuild from scratch. The reason that the LOVEBUG caused so much damage is from downtime while computers were being restored. Imagine the toll if the government agencies affected did not have back-ups of their critical data.

6. Watch out for variants! There were about a dozen copycats of the LOVEBUG. Some had subjects that lead the recipient to believe that the file was an Anti-Virus application that should be run to cure the infection. These things are getting trickier! Today's virus changes the subject line, so there is no way to get an accurate warning to the masses.

7. Keep your Anti-Virus software up to date. Most of the vendors offer updates monthly, or in the case of a crisis.

And finally, keep up to date on the latest virus threats. The most prevalent ones are usually reported in the news, but you can check out the latest virus and hoaxes (which can become as bad as viruses themselves through repeated forwarding) online at the McAfee.com Virus Information Library.

In addition, any serious virus threats will be announced on this resource site.

–J

Jennifer Nieland is the lab coordinator for the College of the Design student computer labs. She didn't get even one ILOVEYOU message last Thursday and is glad of it!