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Viruses 1

© Ian Carr-de Avelon

There was a time when I had heard and read about computer viruses, but never had one myself; halcyon days. I remember quite well how I discovered the first one. I was copying a demonstration program to post it to someone and I decided to do it by copying the contents of a floppy disk to the hard disk and then copying the files back to another floppy disk. To my shock the files which had fit on one floppy disk didn't fit on another. I sat dazed sure that a virus had used some of the space on the floppy disk, but with no experience of dealing with viruses.

I got some antivirus software and started doing some reading. I acted very responsiblely, which is typical of me. I disconnected the computer from the net, I informed the network administrator and my colleagues. I took to heart all the advice I could find and suggested that everyone in the office should change their working practices to cut out viruses spreading. That was the first, and so far, last virus I have had. It was not the last virus in the office, because nobody else made any changes. The next virus was discovered only after an important customer rang to complain that we had infected them, and it soon became obvious that we must have sent it to many more customers too. I felt sure that they would take some action then, surely they had only ignored my experience because I was unimportant in the organisation and I had (by chance) spotted it and dealt with it quite easily. Well, no, they were still getting viruses when I left a year or so later.

I run Linux, so I don't get viruses. It is much more difficult to find a way of infecting Linux and very few virus writers can be bothered to try at all. Viruses still remain a part of my life because I have clients and they run windows. They phone me with strange stories and I find the culprit is a virus. Just at the moment I have a complaint that a dial on demand server is connected for too long. Ie the client has a local network, but they don't have a permanent connection to the Internet. Instead they have a PC running Linux, which when it sees that one of the PCs on the net is trying to connect to the Internet, makes a phone or ISDN connection until the PC stops using the Internet, and then it hangs up. In this way it looks to the staff like they have Internet all the time, but they don't pay the costs of a fixed line. Obviously the costs are only lower if the dial on demand server does its job and is only connected when it is needed.

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