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Computer Viruses. Technology Update. INSTITUTION Kent State Univ., OH DOCUMENT RESUME ED 412 892 IR 018 338 AUTHOR Ponder, Tim, Comp.; Ropog, Marty, Comp.; Keating, Joseph, Comp. TITLE Computer Viruses. Technology Update. INSTITUTION Kent State Univ., OH. Ohio Literacy Resource Center. PUB DATE 1997-00-00 NOTE 5p.; Compiled from information from the Internet. AVAILABLE FROM Available on the World Wide Web at: http://literacy.kent.edu/oasis/pubs/0500-4.html PUB TYPE Reports Descriptive (141) EDRS PRICE MF01/PC01 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS *Computer Networks; *Computer Security; Computer Software; Disk Drives; Floppy Disks; Information Sources; Information Technology; Microcomputers; *Prevention; Problems; Risk Management; Technical Assistance IDENTIFIERS *Computer Viruses; Data Security ABSTRACT This document provides general information on computer viruses, how to help protect a computer network from them, measures to take if a computer becomes infected. Highlights include the origins of computer viruses; virus contraction; a description of some common virus types (File Virus, Boot Sector/Partition Table Viruses, Trojan Horses, and Stealth Viruses); and prevention. A list of common virus symptoms and resources for technical support are included.(AEF) **************************** ***** *********************************************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. ******************************************************************************** 039-0500-0004 hio MARCH 1997 Literacy Enhancing adult literacy in the State of Ohio Resource TECHNOLOGY UPDATE Center EDUCATION U,S. DEPARTMENT OFand Improvement Office of Educational Research EDUCATIONAL RESOURCESINFORMATION "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS CENTER (ERIC) reproduced as MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED Bt T his document has been received from the person ororganization originating it. Tim Ponder Minor changes have beenmade to improve reproductionquality. COMPUTER VI RUSES stated in this Points of view or opinions document do not necessarilyrepresent official OERI position orpolicy. TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCE: INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)." COMPUTER. VIRUS:reactions to hearing those university labs - to demonstrate the "potential" words vary greatly. Too often, the reaction is one of threat that such software codes could provide. By two extremes. Either the computer users ignore the 1987, viruses began showing up at several chance of a virus, or they become overly concerned universities around the world. Three of the most CASCADE to the point of not wanting to use the computer for common of today's viruses - STONED, fear of contracting a virus. and FRIDAY THE 13* - fast appeared that year. Computer viruses are very real threats. They Serious outbreaks of these viruses began to DATACRIME can be simply annoying, requiring time to remove appear over the next two years. The and clean up. On the and FRIDAY THE 13* viruses became major media the opposite end of the events. Surprisingly, Bulgaria became known as spectrum, they can be world's Virus Factory in 1990 because of the high very destructive, number of viruses created there. The NCSA destroying data with (National Computer Security Association) found little or no warning. that Bulgaria, home of the notorious Dark Avenger, Viruses are more originated 76 viruses that year, making it the prevalent today than world's single largest virus contributor. Analysts ever, but so are tools believe that Bulgaria's mass production of viruses is due in part to the abundance of well trained but j÷"., Pftlit+LSJOINOCED and techniques to avoid them. To deal unemployed programmers; with nothing to do, with viruses, a user these individuals tried their hand at virus needs to know a bit about them, practice a few good production, with unfortunately successful results. habits, run an effective anti-virus program, and This growing activity of virus production know what to do if one does strike. convinced the computer industry that viruses were a The first sections focus on general virus serious threat and defensive measures should be information. Following that is a list of things to do developed. IBM created its High Integrity and not to do in order to help protect a computer or Computing Laboratory to lead Big Blue's anti-virus network as well as measures to take if a computer research. Symantec, which began offering does become infected. The last section contains Symantec Anti-Virus, was one of the first several resources to find more information. commercially available virus defenses. This new 1:,c) technology came none too soon. By 1991, the first (1) POLYMORPHIC viruses - that can, like the AIDS tr) ORIGIN$ OF COMF'UTER VJRUSKS( virus in humans, change their shape to elude Jo detection - began to spread and attack in significant O As recent as the mid-80's computer viruses did numbers. During that year, the total viruses began not exist. The first viruses were created in to swell, topping some 1,000 for the first time. 2 BEST COPY AVAILABLE VIRUS CONTRACTION The virus inserts its own code in any part of the file. Provided it changes the host's code, the program execution is misdirected so that it executes the virus Viruses come from a variety of sources. Because code first, rather than the legitimate program. a virus is software code, it can be transmitted along with any legitimate software that enters your Boot Sector/Partition Table Viruses environment. While there are only about 200 different boot In a 1991 study of major U.S. and Canadian sector viruses, they make up 75 percent of allvirus computer users by the market research firm infections. Boot sector viruses include Stoned, the Dataquest for the National Computer Security most common of all time, and Michelangelo, perhaps Association, most users blamed an infected the most notorious. These viruses are so prevalent diskette (87 percent). Forty-three percent of because they are harder to detect, since they do not the diskettes responsible for introducing a change a file size or slow performance, and are fairly virus into a corporate computing environment invisible until their trigger event occurs - such as the were brought from home. reformatting of a hard disk. They also spread rapidly. Nearly three-quarters (71 percent) of The boot sector virus infects floppy disks and infections occurred in a networked hard disks by inserting itself into the boot sector of the environment, making rapid spread a serious disk, which contains code that's executed during the risk. With networking, enterprise computing system boot process. Booting from an infectedfloppy and inter-organizational communication on allows the virus to jump to the computer's harddisk. the increase, infection during The virus executes first and gains control of the telecommunication and networking is system boot even before MS-DOS is loaded.Because growing. the virus executes before the operating system is Seven percent said they had acquired their loaded, it is not MS-DOS specific and can infect any virus while downloading software from an PC operating system platform - MS-DOS, Windows, electronic bulletin board service. OS/2, PC-NFS, or Windows NT. Other sources of infected diskettes included The virus goes into RAM, and infects every disk demo disks, diagnostic disks used by service that is accessed until the computer is rebooted and the technicians and shrink-wrapped software virus is removed from memory. Because theseviruses disks - contributing six percent of reported are memory resident, they canbe detected by running infections. CHKDSK to view the amount of RAM and observeif the expected total has declined by a few kilobytes. TEC1-111 I CAL OVPRVI E,& Partition table viruses attack the hard disk partition table by moving it to a different sector and replacing Viruses are small software programs. At the very the original partition table with its own infectious least, to be considered a virus, these programs must code. These viruses spread from the partitiontable to be able to replicate themselves. They do this by the boot sector of floppy disks as floppies are exploiting computer code already on the host system. accessed. The virus can infect, or become resident in, almost any software component, including an application, Trojan Horses operating system, system boot code or device driver. Like its namesake, the Trojan Horse virus Viruses gain control over their host in various ways. typically masquerades as something desirable -like a The following is a summary of some more common legitimate software program. The Trojan Horse virus types, how they function, and how you can generally does not replicate (but some cases of fight them. replication have been discovered). This virus type generally waits for a triggering event like displaying a File Virus message or reformatting a harddisk before it performs the infection. Most of the thousands of viruses known to exist are file viruses, including the FRIDAY THE13th Stealth Viruses virus. They infect file by attaching themselves to a Stealth viruses have special engineering that file, generally an executable file - the .EXE and enables them to elude detection by traditionalanti- .COM files that control applications and programs. virus tools. The stealth virus adds itself to afile or -2- 3 boot sector but, when you examine the host to scan any files downloaded immediately after software, it appears normal and unchanged. The saving. Or, better yet, set your virus software to do stealth virus performs this trickery by lurking in this automatically. Another good habit is to be memory when executed. There it monitorsand careful where you download from. Large sites such intercepts your system's MS-DOS calls. When the as www.shareware.com or software andhardware system seeks to open an infected file, the stealth companies are generally safer. Individuals on the virus races ahead, uninfects the file and allows MS- Web may not have taken as many precautions. DOS to open it - all appears normal. When MS- DOS closes the file, the virus reverses these actions, As mentioned, a virus is generally carried in reinfecting the file. programs that do something, such as zip, com, bat and exe files.
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