Virus, dangerous enemies

1988/04/01 Elhuyar Zientzia Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Softwarea

The latest news points to the emergence of a virus that is contaminating computers around the world. How to avoid being damaged in this epidemic?

This computer virus is only a part of the program capable of infecting the machine. This part of the program is integrated into a pirate program. At the same time it is launched, the system changes and many times a routine is released that removes all information from the hard disk.

Although the origin of this virus is unknown, it is spreading rapidly.

The virus is found in the COMMAND.COM file. If the computer starts from a contaminated floppy disk, it will be enough for TYPE, COPY, DIR or any other command to access another floppy disk to put it in danger. If this disket contains the COMMAND.COM file, the virus will be copied into it by infecting the floppy disk. Each time this occurs, a counter will be added to the program used for boot. When this counter reaches 4, the information contained in any of the disks entered on the computer will be abruptly removed. Therefore, when we realize that there is some problem, we have the virus spread.

However, there is a way to avoid it. If we suspect that a disket is infected, it will suffice for the computer to leave this floppy disk and access a type-protected floppy disk. What is achieved with this? If a virus copy session is carried out in the latter disket, the system will give an error indicating that it cannot be written on said floppy disk. Thus we can know if the floppy disk used for startup carried the virus or not.

Therefore, it is not usually a nonsense to put the write protection label on disks.

The attack of this virus can be for both floppy disks and hard disks.

For this reason, it is convenient to maintain the habit of getting backups from the beginning, although it often seems like a useless job. It can be the only solution to this type of catastrophes.