Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Virus Hoax
A virus hoax is an e-mail that is intended to scare people about a non-
existent virus threat. Users often forward these alerts, thinking they are
doing a service to their fellow workers; but this causes lost productivity,
panic, and lost time. This increased traffic can soon become a massive
problem in e-mail systems and cause unnecessary fear and panic. A sample
of a virus hoax:
Dear All,
For your reference, take necessary precautions. If you
receive an e-mail with a file called California, do not
open the file. The file contains WOBBLER virus.
WARNING
This information was announced yesterday morning from
IBM; AOL states that this is a very dangerous virus, much
worse than “Melissa,” and that there is NO remedy for it
at this time. Some very sick individual has succeeded in
using the reformat function from Norton Utilities,
causing it to completely erase all documents on the hard
drive. It has been designed to work with Netscape
Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer. It destroys
Macintosh and IBM-compatible computers. This is a new,
very malicious virus and not many people know about it.
HOW VIRUSES INFECT
Viruses, whether they are boot viruses, file viruses, or macro viruses,
can employ none, one, or several of the following techniques to spread or
conceal themselves.
Multi-partite Viruses
Multi-partite viruses often infect multiple targets instead of just one type
of file or disk. For example, they will infect both files and boot records on
hard disks, or both files and boot sectors on floppy disks.
Polymorphic Viruses
A polymorphic virus change segments of its own code so that it looks
like a different virus from one infection to another. This technique is
employed by virus creators to make it more difficult for anti-virus (AV) soft-
ware to detect them, because detection software has a more difficult time
comparing the changing virus to its inventory of known viruses.
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