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FRIDAY March 5, 2004 - Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Valley&State Backpage O&E Sports Archives Classifieds Faith&Beliefs Obituaries Revels February 4, 2004 The Powderhorn Viruses keep getting smarter Peter Hahnloser At about the time Howard Dean was making what were reported to be "self-effacing" comments after his Iowa loss, I was sitting at my computer making what could only be described as self-defacing comments. For many years, I have been into computers - tinkering with upgrading the little parts instead of buying a Dell, beta testing for Microsoft, and so forth. So when I got the latest virus a week and a half ago, I was nonplussed. It wouldn't have been such an unpleasant experience if I'd realized it was a virus, but I instead decided that it was time to reformat my hard drive and start fresh. Viruses aren't so keen on letting you start fresh. Lax security Tech-savvy people are big into antivirus protection, but I'd had a good long run without a problem, so security on my machine was, to be blunt, lax. No firewall, no software to stop something from hacking into my system and hundreds of gigabytes of hard drive space. When reports of the virus, known as "MyDoom," appeared, various news agencies quoted experts in software security as saying the coding was similar to the previous worm to wreak major havoc on corporate networks, with one key difference: It spreads faster. Few things are worse to hear about malicious software, though the sheer speed wasn't what was most vexing about this particular visitor. When I'd finally come to my senses and installed an antivirus program, the intruder simply shut down the program before it could scan anything. Gone, thankfully, are the days when the purpose of a virus was to make people lose all of their data. Time was, you got a virus and the next thing you knew, your hard drives were being formatted. Of course, once CD burners came into mainstream use, that became a somewhat pointless goal - people could regain any lost data in a matter of hours. The race was on to find something that would be equally annoying, if not more so. Whoever came up with making machines randomly reboot within a half hour of starting up really hit the nail on the head. Even people who know a bit about computers can be thrown for a loop, engaging in trying to solve the problem for hours before it becomes clear that everything checks out. So much for theory Back to my situation, once I made the decision to format, I expected the standard 90 minutes out of my day to reinstall Windows and the applications. By bedtime, I'd be up and running, and things would be going great again. In theory. Instead, I not only lost the space where I'd installed Windows, but also my largest partition for user files. It was all backed up on CD, of course, but 140 gigabytes is more than 200 CDs, and that takes a while to throw back on. It was in the middle of trying to put everything back in place that it became clear this wasn't simply an issue of my previous setup. A program crucial to Windows� smooth operation was unexpectedly quitting, taking with it the vast majority of functionality of everything. Without going into graphic detail about terminating services and modifying permissions on executables in the system32 directory, I'll just say that I'm not likely to go without antivirus protection ever again. But perhaps I can spare you some of my grief. Granted, what follows is hardly original, but if I'd payed attention to what I read, I wouldn't have wasted eight hours putting things on my hard drive that I'd spent even more time backing up. The first best line of defense is keeping up-to-date on security patches from Microsoft (available at http://www.microsoft.com/security/). While not foolproof - or perhaps "virus proof" - this step alone can save a lot of headaches. Having an antivirus program is the next logical step. Most of these aren't free, but Trend Micro has one available at housecall.trendmicro.com that is good if you know you've got something but aren't sure how to get rid of it. Each time a new virus comes out, it's going to be better than previous attempts (since plenty of companies make lots of money figuring out how to thwart what malicious programmers will try next), so it's good to keep current on preventive measures. I certainly won't complain about having all my files scanned the next time I get saved from a weekend of time wasted on trying to fix the wrong problem. Peter Hahnloser is the News Editor for the Ashland Daily Tidings. He can be reached at 482-3456 x3021 or [email protected] DailyTidings.com Home Page Valley&State | Backpage | O&E | Sports | Archives | Weather | Classifieds Columnists | Faith&Beliefs | Obituaries | Revels | Subscribe | Contact Us Copyright 2004 Ashland Daily Tidings and Ottaway Newspapers All Rights Reserved Site Search: The new search is here! Click here for more information. .:Advertisements:. RESOURCES - ODOT Road Cams