Anti-Virus Tip
By Craig Brougher
To all AMD'ers,
I discovered I had picked up a virus somewhere called antiexe, a boot sector virus which was making my CDROM invisible, for one thing. It had to have come off the internet, but whether I got it directly, or whether my repair shop gave it to me is questionable, since I also found the same virus on what looked like two brand new floppy disks which had only been labeled for future use but were empty. I have disinfected everything including my tape backups now, and have been pronounced clean, but while I have only been dealing in e-mail, some of those files still have attachments. I do not know if, when a virus is compressed and encoded (assuming that it can be), it can be recognized by virus software.
The program which found the virus was called Mcafee, downloaded from the web and good for 30 days. It was a real help, since things were disappearing right and left. Windows 95 actually alerted me to the fact that I might have a virus, and to check it out. Pretty smart, huh?
Craig B.
[ Editor's Note:
[
[ I have used McAfee antivirus and like it. You can use it to
[ scan disks _before_ you run them. A common way for a PC
[ to get infected is to power it up with an infected floppy
[ inserted. If there is a virus in the boot block on the floppy,
[ it get executed unless your "BIOS Boot Order" is set to C;A rather
[ than the usual A;C. The Mac's have their own set of viruses.
[ A good rule of thumb is to virus check everything you receive.
[ Check your machine after running anything of unknown origin.
[ My favorite Windows unzipper "WinZip" has an option to virus-check
[ the contents of a zip file before you execute it.
[
[ Jody
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(Message sent Mon 13 May 1996, 12:47:55 GMT, from time zone GMT.) |
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