Report on the Psychology of Computer Viruses

VIRUSES OF THE COMPUTER KIND!!!!

 Mr. Sasabe in generation seven didn?t own a computer and was using various computer labs around campus. He unfortunately experienced the effects of a computer virus which erased all of his work. He had to retype his work to publish it on the web. After the unfortunate incident he refrained from using various computers and stuck to one computer in Porteus hall. He never did find out what the problem was. I think this is a horrible problem and I feel very sorry for this student. I understand how hard it is to do your work if you don?t have a computer at home. I have just recently purchased a computer and am very glad I did. Personally I have not had trouble with computer viruses. I have had problems with my computer freezing when I get kicked out of America Online due to incoming calls. This causes me to loose what ever work I may be working on. I don?t think this is a virus, but a glitch in the software programming. I am not sure if my computer has a virus checker, but I am pretty careful what computers at school I put my disk in. I always use the same computer either mine at home or one computer in our 409 lab. I am not too worried about the issue because I don?t know too much about viruses or how they work. I am getting more worried the more I look into this report.

I asked my girlfriend if she has ever had a problem with computer viruses. She said that once her roommates? computer froze up when she had been using it. She ended up loosing everything on the hard drive, but she was not sure if it was because of a computer virus. Her roommate luckily had backup disks for all the programs. It was however, a real hassle.

2.Interpretation of news item DOE WARNING!

The Department of Energy issued a warning on a virus, which was named either Teardrop or land. The virus or program looks for susceptible servers and sends multiple bogus messages to overwhelm the server.

Personally I like the idea of hackers and the thought of being able too break into top secret military installation, because I feel like they hide too much stuff from the public. But after reading this it makes me realize that some hackers are just nuisance and I hope they get hacked into and someone sends them a virus they can?t avoid. I am glad that people are warned about these types of viruses, hopefully when virus senders realize that people will not stand for it, by stopping the virus before it starts they will no longer write these virus. This problem reminds me of the problem we had at my highschool one year. Taggers which are kids who use spray paint on walls to write their names would write all over my school. The school took initiative to cover it the very next day and too implement the use of security. When the taggers realized that their handiwork was to no avail, because it was covered up the very next morning they stopped doing it. I feel that if we stop viruses before they can get used by these culprits then they will become frustrated and stop spending a lot of time doing senseless acts that are inconsiderate.

This site was full of useful information I accessed it from the second site on my list. I found out about all the recent viruses, including the Melissa virus that enters your system when you open an attachment connected to an email. Go here to find any information on many viruses. Very informative. This was the best site I found.

This site is the Forum of incident response and security teams. First is a coalition that is aimed at preventing incidences from viruses. It has 70 members that are from government, commercial, and academic organizations. They promote information sharing to prevent the reoccurrence of incidents in any computer system. On this site you can access their members page. On that page is a long list of links to organizations including some of the ones on my instructor?s list.

Australian compeer Emergency Response team. This is the equivalent of the U.S. Cert org. The first one on my list above.

Department of Defense Computer Emergency Response Team. This site is also helpful in discovering and notifying people about computer viruses. It is one of the groups that participate with the first org. #2.

Part of the Cert organization this page is the German brother to the institution. There are also pages in English available at this site. Cert was number 1 on my list. A list of viruses can be found here.

 A computer virus is usually a short program that was designed by an individual to disperse itself and make copies of it in other computers. Its purpose is usually to disrupt a computers normal operations. A virus is usually spread via floppy disks, networks and online services and is usually in the file or boot part of a disk. Some viruses are harmless but many are troublesome. Historically it has been known or suspected that individuals called Hackers are responsible for originating computer viruses. These Hackers are usually smart individuals who want to access other computers either with the purpose of curiosity or with the intent of acquiring or using information.

 Computer viruses work in your computer or on you disk by setting themselves up so when you try to access a program you are sent to the virus. You cannot obtain you information because the virus has changed the accessing information on your disk or computer. Some viruses work by bombing a server or site with unwanted mail. This creates the server or site to be overloaded. Hackers can access sites by doing this and they can obtain information.

Some viruses can be sent via email on the net. For example this is how the Melissa virus works. When you open an infected document, if you use Microsoft Outlook as your email system, the Melissa virus will send a copy of itself as an email attachment to the first fifty people in your address book. And when those people receive the message and open the attachment, the virus will send itself to fifty of their friends, and so on, and so on, and so on.

 The CAP macro virus, which infects Microsoft Word documents, was first spotted in early 1997, and has gone from being another obscure macro virus to the most widely reported single virus in history.

Melissa. In the span of just a couple of days it spread worldwide, faster than any PC virus in history. That's because of the way it spreads. It spreads through email and is in the form of an attachment.

Another problem that can create a virus could be the potential for Spam or unwanted email to propagate to magnitude proportions, which could overload a system. The famous Spam of Craig Shergold is still circulating. The make a wish foundation is being bombarded by email for this child who had a brain tumor. The thing is that the make a wish foundation was not even connected with this particular boy and he is now okay after receiving surgery.

 Myths include ones I have always believed due to media exploitation or because of movies I have seen. Myths: teenage hackers write most of the viruses out there. All purposely-destructive code spreads like a virus. Viruses infect up to 25% of all IBM PC's every month. Another misconception is that: antivirus software will protect me from viruses. Viruses can infect files on write-protected floppy disks and CD-Roms. One myth that I do believe is Antivirus firms write and/or distributes viruses as a way to increase sales of their software. One interesting myth I found was that some believe that the U.S. government planted a virus in Iraqi military computers during the gulf war. Usually myths are propagated by word of mouth in people. On the computer many myths are propagated by email chain letters. One person starts a myth by sending it to others. The message states that if you receive an email with a specific title "( )" and you open it, it will download a virus. Then it tells you to send it too all your friends. The myth turns into an irritating email chain letter, which will invariably be sent back to you.

 The significance of computer viruses is that they are real and annually they do cause a lot of data loss, a lot of wasted time and money, and they are irritating. I?m not sure if they actually spread and propagate like a virus. I understand that is possible to write in commands to systematically have them invade one site and then another and another, so in that way they spread with intent like a biological virus has. A biological virus spreads from one organism to another with the intent of living off of it and a byproduct is that it usually kills the organism. This is also true of a computer virus. It is meant to inhabit another computer system and change the normal programming of that system. Other cases like email overloads and Spam can create a virus that is very much like a biological virus. Its aim is just to access a site, but it can cause problem just by the sheer number of emails sent to one site. I read something about antivirus entities that search for viruses. You can definitely analogize these to the immune system. So if we have antigens or t-cells then can we consider this to be an immunology shot like we receive as children for Measles, Mumps and Rubella.

These sites will tell you if the hoax is real.