Today, I want to talk about computer viruses. A virus is a program, a piece of software, that makes copies of itself and transmits itself to other computer systems, without the permission of those systems’ owners. It does this to put a program onto a system that a knowledgeable user would never put on his or her system deliberately – a program that causes some computer malfunction or other bit of mischief, like erasing files. Hypothetically, one could write a virus to do some helpful function, but since viruses operate without the users’ knowledge or consent, if one was to be written, most people infected by it would be offended and angered anyway.

I bring this up not only because the “myDoom” virus is making its rounds, nor only because a friend of mine wrote me an email today asking for help with a possible virus, but also because of a woman whose system was brought in this week. As a normal precaution, I ran a virus scan on it.

The virus scan discovered 690 files infected with viruses.

Six-hundred ninety!

That’s a lot of infected files. Normally, you might find 2 or 3, or over a dozen on a really bad system. But 690? That’s just mind-boggling. It’s especially mind-boggling because protection is so easy, when you know what to do.

Step 1: Avoidance Viruses are caught in two major places – pornographic websites and file-sharing networks like Kazaa. If you don’t look for porn, and don’t trade music illegally, you’ve eliminated most of your risk.

Step 2: Alertness If you think your computer has been infected, and you have internet access, run an online virus scan to check things out. Don’t sit around in fear: find out for sure. If it identifies an infected file, delete it!

Step 3: Aggression Be proactive in stopping viruses before they get into your system. At work, we recommend Norton Antivirus software, which retails for $50-60. Included with the price is a one-year subscription to their online updating service, which identifies new viruses as they appear and releases updates to stop them.

In other news, I got to explore another part of Atlanta when my coworker’s truck broke down while he was on a computer delivery. I got to have my lunch break interrupted (grumble, grumble) and drive down to pick him up. It was on Buford Highway, which has lots of stores with names in Korean or Japanese (with no English translation). He was at “Ming’s Auto Service.” All I could think about was Ming the Merciless, the archenemy of Flash Gordon in the newspaper serials and Saturday afternoon movie cliffhangers. (Needless to say, there was no intergalactic dictator running the auto shop. That I know of.) We had to leave the company van in their service center, and we don’t know how long it’ll be before they get the radiator fixed. At any rate, it was good to get out of the back room and see the sun for a while.