Some tips for simple virus problems

Some tips for simple virus problems

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): A good friend from Medan recently told me her
ISP had warned her that she had a virus called W95/MTX@M in her
outgoing e-mail.

She was asking whether the ISP was really blocking her e-mail
or whether it was just a demo. The wording of the warning, made
her think that it was more of a marketing message. I agree. The
ISP seemed to be offering virus scanning as a value-added
service, which is not a bad thing at all given the real threat of
virus and worm infection over the Net.

The question is, of course, how effective is it?

When I checked the ISP's website, I learned that they would
only scan all e-mail messages and their attachments. They would
discard a message or an attached file if they find a virus in it.
The problem is, what if the message or the file is important? The
intended recipient will never receive it. Obviously, what we
would prefer the ISP to do is to sterilize the message and then
deliver it to the addressees.

If you have a Yahoo e-mail account and you use it to send
files, the attached files will also be scanned by Norton
Antivirus.

Better still, the service is free. However, I have found out
that it does not work with files created with Lotus WordPro.

Real Time Protection

The best protection against viruses should be a continually
updated antivirus program installed in our computers plus a
proper system for handling e-mail messages and attachments.
We can still receive important messages and files sent to us, but
the antivirus program will clean them for us automatically.

Nowadays there are several ways in which we can subscribe
to services that protect our computers from these unwelcome
intruders.

One of them, which I have mentioned a couple of times in this
column in the past, is to subscribe to online virus protection
offered by companies such as McAfee (www.mcafee.com).

At the moment, McAfee is offering a two-year subscription to
Online VirusScan for US$39.90. You will need a 24-hour access to
the Internet to really benefit from the service, though. There
are also free services available from other companies. Trend
Micro's PC Cilin House Call (www.trendmicro.com), for example,
will also check your system remotely. However, as expected from a
free service, it does not provide a real-time protection against
viruses. What the visiting doctor does is just to detect a virus
if it exists on your computer. You will have to kill it yourself.
PC Cilin does offer information on the steps that you can try.

AVG Antivirus (www.grisoft.com/html/us_index.cfm) has gone a
lot further by offering a free antivirus program. Called AVG 6.0,
it offers nice features such as Resident Protection, E-mail
Scanner, Scheduled Tests and Free Updates on a monthly basis,
Automatic Update and a Virus Vault for keeping infected files
contained. AVG also offers commercial services that include
unlimited support for this free program.

Besides AVG Antivirus, McAfee and Trend Micro, there are other
companies that also make very powerful commercial antivirus
programs.

Symantec's Norton Antivirus is usually considered the best
(www.symantec.com), but Panda Software (www.pandasoftware.com)
also provides an award-winning antivirus program for home and
business users.

If you have a virus problem, you can also take advantage of
the evaluation version of antivirus products that you may
download from the Web. Trend Micro and AVG Antivirus currently
offer PC Cilin 2000 for a free trial period of 30 days.

One thing to keep in mind is that once you have chosen a
particular antivirus program, you had better stick to it. The
PC's performance usually degrades significantly if more than one
antivirus program is running at the same time. These antivirus
programs consume a lot of memory, too. If you want to switch
programs, make sure that the old antivirus program is completely
uninstalled before you install the new one.

Another thing about viruses is that a lot of information about
them is also available at our disposal. To learn more about this
particular virus, for example, we can go to McAfee Virus
Information library (http://vil.mcafee.com/default.asp?). Here we
can search for information on W95/MTX@M. The comprehensive
information even includes the manual steps that you can take to
get rid of it -- including deleting the infected files.

Antivirus Best Practices

Some types of computer viruses come into our mailbox and
infect our system the moment it appears in the Preview window.
This is very sneaky, because we do not have the chance to protect
ourselves. What I have done to protect myself is to close the
Preview window in my Outlook Express.

The downside is that I cannot immediately see the content of
an e-mail message when Outlook Express is running. On the other
hand, I now have the chance to check the credibility of each
incoming message before double-clicking on it to see what it
contains.

To close the Preview window in Outlook Express, click on the
View menu item, and then on Layout. In the dialog box, uncheck
Show preview pane, and then click OK.

What about dubious attachments? You must always check the
names of the attached files. Be extremely careful if the names
end with .com, .exe, .txt, .pif, .vbs and .bat.
Some virus makers have tricked a lot of victims into believing
that they are receiving benign picture files by inserting .jpg
or .pic into the filenames, but they still end with .vbs or
.exe.

As viruses can also come in document files in the form of
macros, how can you protect against them? The best practice is
never to open a file unless you are expecting it from the sender.
If you receive an attached file that you do not expect, it is a
good practice to ask the sender whether he has really sent the
file to you. A lot of viruses and worms use our e-mail client
program's Address Book to send out e-mail messages completely
without our knowledge.

So, a practice that we all should probably adopt is to first
inform the recipients that we are about to send them a file
before we do it. Better still, we can include the names of the
files that we are going to send them. (zatni@cbn.net.id)