VIRII ON THE PC (A personal experience) By Grimwold "Virus found in memory, installation aborted." This rather puzzling message came up when I first tried to install a virus-shield on my 386. For anyone who doesn't know, a virus-shield is a small program that is normally loaded into your computer's memory when you boot your PC (assuming you've included one in your AUTOEXEC.BAT file) which stays in memory all the time and checks for viruses as you run programs, install new disks or whatever, giving your computer supposedly total protection against these nasty little things. Now when that message came up, I was a bit alarmed. No, let me rephrase that, I was a LOT alarmed! You see, I'd been using my 386 every evening for about a fortnight since I got it and had put an awful lot of disks into the two little holes in the front, both 3.5" and 5.25". Anyway, I now knew that I was infected by an unknown virus, but what could I do about it? I got a couple of shareware programs from a friend I was seeing that night, and the next day attempted to eradicate myself of this problem. Reading the instructions that came with the 'cleaning' programs, I booted from a 'clean' disk (Useful mottos you won't find in any Christmas Cracker no.1 "Always keep a write-protected boot disk in case of emergencies!") and run the 'checker program' - this one finds the name of the virus and assigns it a code. Then I ran the 'cleaner' program, giving details of the virus found by the checker and its code (in this case, it was called "Stoned"). The hard drive light flashed for a while and another message appeared: "Virus [Stoned] successfully removed from boot partition." "Great!", I thought, "I've gotten rid of it!". So I tried installing the virus-shield again. I got the first message on my screen once more. It turned out that the actual disk the virus-shield program came on, was infected! Every time I was trying to install the shield, it was infecting the hard drive and hence, the memory! Eventually, I managed to install the shield and clean my hard drive of all virii. I then relaxed and continued to use my computer. Except for one thing. Nearly EVERY floppy disk I put in the machine was infected! Only those that were write- protected were clear and it took me a good ten hours to clear all my disks, all through which I was muttering obscene things about the programmer who wrote that virus. It also took me another evening to clean a friend's PC that I had been using and had inadvertently infected. By the way, I checked out some documentation of "Stoned" and I read that the damage caused when activated was: "Minor - disk trashing." Disk- trashing MINOR? What this actually meant was that after a random amount of time, "Stoned" would corrupt the FAT (File Allocation Table) on my hard drive, making it inoperable until re-formatted. Very fortunately, I caught it before this happened. Six months later, I now use a virus-shield all the time. It takes up about 40k of expanded memory, but this is well worth it for peace of mind. I've caught another two viruses on disks sent to me by various PC contacts; "June the 14th" and "Azura" and have notified the people concerned. In addition to that, since the shield can only scan for the more widespread virii, I also check each and every file on my hard drive once a week with another program. That takes about half an hour, but again, is worth it for peace of mind. As I run a shareware library, I have a large amount of disks coming and going, so it's a major concern for me not to spread any virus to anyone else. There is a lot of talk about virii at the moment, though some of it is plain and simple scaremongering. The majority of virii are 'fairly' harmless and none can cause physical permanent damage to your computer. I've heard of one called "MAX" which, on Max Bygrave's birthday, plays one of his tunes constantly through the PC speaker for 24 hours! Can you think of anything much worse? Though this may seem fairly harmless, even a bit of fun, this isn't to say that you'd ever want any virii on your computer, you almost definitely wouldn't - the chance that it could be malignant is too great to take, and the replication ability of these program would put a colony of rabbits to shame! With the more active ones, they copy themselves onto EVERY floppy or hard disk you come in contact with and if you're connected to a modem, then they'll even spread that way. They will even infect individual programs making them even more difficult to trace. The biggest ally to any virus is ignorance. If a user doesn't know much about virii, then they are a good target. If you want to protect yourself, get hold of a virus-shield program and use it. You don't have to keep it loaded all the time, taking up precious memory, but it would be foolhardy not to use it when loading in new programs for the first time, even if you've got them from a friend. Another useful step is to write-protect your more valuable disks, such as your original boot disk - but as soon as the disks are write-enabled, a virus can make itself at home whenever that disk is used by an infected system. There are, I believe, in excess of 2000 different virii, and many have sub-strains which are created by the evolution process of a virus itself. A copy of McAffee's shareware virus shield, checker and killer programs on 3.5" disk is available from me, send œ1.50 payable to Simon Avery, Round Corner Shareware Library, Hamlyn's Cottage, Old Exeter Road, Chudleigh, South Devon, TQ13 0DX. Tel:0626 853254 Please quote disk ref: MISC002 and ask for a catalogue.