The Discordant Opposition Journal Issue 7 - File 9
:Have You got a Virus?:
Kleptic
Your computer may be crawling with viruses, and you may not know it. Many viruses lie dormant, surrepititiously spreading around you hard disk and any disks you insert into your floppy drive. Other virii make their presence known as soon as you run an infected program.
Obviously, the sooner you detect an infection, the sooner you can remove the virus before it "explodes" and does its damage. There are two common ways to detect a virus infection:
- Run one or more antivirus programs periodically.
- Watch your computer for erratic behavior.
The more antivirus programs you have, the more likely at least one of them will catch any viruses your computer might have. A few viruses know how to slip past the more popular antivirus programs, so relying on just one antivirus program is like locking all of the doors and windows of your house except one. A new or particular tricky virus may even slip past all of you antivirus programs, in which case your only protection will be watching your computer for obvious signs of infection.
No antivirus program can be 100% effective at detecting and removing all viruses. Fortunately, this also means that-no matter how a virus tries to hide itself using stealth techniques, polymorphism, or retaliating tactics, no virus can be 100% undetectable either.
Even if you run an antivirus program, it's important to watch your machine for unusual behavior that might spell V-I-R-U-S.
Computer slows to a crawl
Just because your computer responds slower than usually doesn't mean that you have a virus; you may simply have too many programs loaded at the same time. Generally, the more programs loaded into your computer's memory, the slower you computer will work. Try exiting out of those programs you absolutely don't need to free up some memory. If this solution doesn't speed up you computer, you might really have a virus. Some viruses slow your computer down, eventually bringing it to a complete standstill as the virus speeds.
Strange pictures or messages appear
To announce their presence, many viruses display a message ("You're Screwed") or a picture (such as an ambulance driving across the bottom of the screen). The harmless viruses display a message or a picture and nothing more. The malicious viruses display a message or a picture before or after the virus has already deleted a file or wrecked part of your hard disk.
Any time you see such an obviously strange picture or message on your screen, you can assume your computer is infected by a virus.
By the way, MS-DOS viruses can only display a strange picture or message on your screen if you're using MS-DOS. If you only run Windows programs, an MS-DOS virus won't be able to run or display any weird pictures on your screen.
Other computers at work have similar problems
Perhaps the easiest way to determine if your computer at work is infected is to see if any other computers in your area are experiencing similar problems. For example, if three other people in your office complain that the "Q" key on their keyboard isn't working or that their computer seems abnormally slow, check for a virus.
CLOSING
Thank you for taking time out of your oh so busy schedule to read this text file that took me like 4 years to do and now that I have typed all this out I now have carpel tunnel. If you have any questions just send me a little e-mail, I'll try to answer your questions.
-= KLEPTIC =-
kleptic@grex.org
