Truth And Lies About The Computer Virus :: essays research papers

Truth and Lies almost the Computer VirusWalk into any computer store straightaway and there will be at least twenty orthirty computer virus programs. From the looks of it computer viruses havegotten out of lead and so has the business of stopping it. The computer usermust veer through the media hype of apocoliptic viruses and shareware programsand discover the real facts.     Before we even parachuting the journey of exploring the computer virus we mustfirst eliminate all(prenominal) the "fluff." The computer user needs to understand howinformation about viruses reaches the public. mortal creates the virus andthen infects at least one computer. The virus crashes or ruins the infectedcomputer. A anti-virus companionship obtains a copy of the virus and studies it. Theanti-virus company take aways an "unbiased" decision about the virus and thendisclose their findings to the public. The occupation with the current system isthat there are no checks and balances. If the anti-virus company wants to makeviruses seem worse all they have to do is distort the truth. there is noorganization that certifies wheather or not a virus is real. blush morepotentially harmful is that the anti-virus companies could write viruses inorder to transmit their programs. Software companies have and do distort the truthabout viruses. "Antivirus firms scat to count even the most insignificantvariations of viruses for advertising purposes. When the Marijuana virus firstappeared, for example, it contained the word "legalise," but a miscreant laterlimited it to read "legalize." Any program which breaks the original virus candetect the version with one letter changed -- but antivirus companies oftencount them as "two" viruses. These obscure differentiations quickly add up."http//www.kumite.com/myths/myth005.htm Incidentally the Marijuana virus is alsocalled the "Stoned" virus there by making it notwith standing another on the list of virusesthat companies protect your computer against.     I went to the McAfee Anti-virus vane site looking for information on theMarijuana virus but was unable to obtain that information. I was however ableto get a copy of the top ten viruses of their site. On specific virus called testicle "Junkie is a multi-partite, memory resident, encrypting virus. Junkiespecifically targets .COM files, the DOS bitch sector on floppy diskettes and theMaster Boot Record (MBR). When sign infection is in the form of a fileinfecting virus, Junkie infects the MBR or floppy boot sector, disables VSafe(an anti-virus terminate-and-stay-resident program (TSR), which is included withMS-DOS 6.X) and loads itself at locating 0, Cylinder 0, Sectors 4 and 5. The virusdoes not become memory resident, or infect files at this time.