Bytemarks
Virus infections pose global threat

By Burt Lum

The threat is real. Computer viruses are infecting more users worldwide, and the Internet is the bloodstream used to circulate this disease. Not that this has curbed my enthusiasm for the Internet, but I'm afraid this malicious behavior only serves to tarnish the experience for many.

Last week was exceptionally hazardous. I was alerted to three separate, active virus attacks. The first came from a distressed friend who got infected by the Badtrans virus. Although I could sympathize with the frustration, there wasn't much I could do except point her to the Symantec and McAfee page for the latest virus threats.

At the same time, I was also notified of the CodeRed Worm virus. Another Windows-directed attack, I would estimate I received nearly 50 e-mail announcements warning of this virus. Fortunately the actual damage was minimal.

The bug that affected me directly was the Sircam worm. Judging from my experience, it must have been hell for the user. Viral attacks often come in the form of e-mail attachments written in Visual Basic and executed as .exe files. Since Macs don't run .exe files, I am safe, or so I thought.

The Sircam worm infects a user's Windows system and then starts to generate e-mail messages that in turn have viral attachments. The Sircam virus scans the user's hard drive for documents and proceeds to send these out as well. In previous e-mail-triggering viruses, I would get one e-mail message. With the Sircam worm, I got multiple messages and multiple copies. The attachments varied from 250K to 7M in size. It became problematic just dealing with deletions. At one point, I must have had 400-plus messages occupying 500-plus megs of my hard drive. But in my case, at least the solution only involved deletions.

The problem was eventually corrected but not without personal suffering. Lessons learned: Get protection, don't open unfamiliar attachments and respect your Macintosh. ;-)

Burt Lum, cyber-citizen and self-anointed tour guide to the Internet, is one click away at burt@brouhaha.net.