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![]() Sick About Viruses
By Sean Scott
As if you don’t have enough to do in your daily life, the Internet has created new hobbyists that think creating viruses in their spare time to help take our minds off our already busy schedules is cool. We don’t think so. We would like to share some tips and guidelines to help keep you on track with your business and not fighting fires with the most recent virus-of-the-week challenge.
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Another good idea is to make a small change to Windows. This isn’t necessary, but I would recommend it because it won’t hurt anything and will give you a better ability to see what you are receiving from others. By default, Windows 98 through Windows 2000 Professional added a little feature that hides the extension, .txt, .exe, .doc, from the end of the filename that you view on your computer. That can cause problems as it did with the loveletter virus, which came in the form of loveletter.txt.vbs. So since windows was hiding the final extension of .vbs, which means it is a Visual Basic Script, you saw the file called loveletter.txt, which by all rights should be a safe file to open. Well guess what, it wasn’t because it was actually the Visual Basic Script that installed the virus. To change the feature that hides your file extensions, follow the steps below: On a Windows 98 operating system, open Windows Explorer. Click on View at the top and click on Folder Options. Then click on the “View” tab at the top of the box that pops up. Scroll down and uncheck the box that states: “Hide extensions for known file types”. Click on the apply button in the bottom right of the box. Then click on “Like Current Folder” button on the top of the box you are looking at and then click on “Yes” that will pop up next. Then click on the OK at the bottom of the box and you are all set. If you’re using Windows 2000 Professional everything is the same except after you open Windows Explorer, you select Tools and then Folder Options then follow the rest of the instructions above. The second line of defense involves preventative education for you and anyone who is using the computers in your business or home. If you receive an attachment from anyone, make sure you know why he or she sent it to you. In the example of the loveletter and with Sircam, the attachments usually came from somebody you already knew. If your Anti-Virus didn’t catch it because the virus was too new and then you opened the attachment, you were in for a one to two hour diversion to fix your computer. So if you don’t know why someone sent you an attachment, e-mail the sender back and ask. Here an ounce of prevention could save you a lot of time and embarrassment. If you use the suggestions above as common practice you will greatly reduce your likelihood of infecting your computer with a nasty virus. Remember that you have to run the attachment in order for your computer to become infected. Simply opening your e-mail box won’t do it. Following all these suggestions won’t guarantee you to not get some virus in the future, but you can at least move that worry further down your list of concerns and focus on getting the work you need to get done. And that is what it is all about.
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