113 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
113 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
r97
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Message 242 of 250 TITLED: Viruses
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BY: Jeff Washburn [#21] TO: All
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On 07/08/88 around 10:54:29
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T E L E C O M M U N I C A T I O N S
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Safe telecommunicating may
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be your best protection
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against viruses.
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BY: Michael Fischer
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Taken from: A+, August 1988, Pp. 81
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We are all familiar with Apple II programs that have bugs, but - until recently - very few of us had heard of viruses, programs that intentionally
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cause your computer to malfunction.
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Viruses have recently been reported in Macintosh and MS-DOS systems. There
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has been alot of talk about a ProDOS-based Apple II virus, although no one has yet confirmed its existance. Nevertheless, you should understand what a virus is so that you can better prepare yourself for the day one might infect your
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computer.
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A computer virus is a program fragment that attaches itself to operating
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systems on other disks in your system and, if you trade programs with others,
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sometimes to their operating systems as well.
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As with its counterpart in humans, the virus spreads in a largely undetected - and undetectable - manner until it is ready to do its damage. The most damaging
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viruses, when they do appear, destroy data, wiping out an entire hard disk.
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If you don't have a back-up (preferably one from before the infection of your system), you stand to loose megabytes of data.
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Unlike its human counterpart, a computer virus cannot be created without a malicious motive. The person who releases a computer virus obviously doesn't
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care about other computer users. This is not the stuff of which heroes are made.
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Viruses often spread on telecommunications systems, when people trade programs. In the Macintosh wolrd, a virus was spread on both GEnie and
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CompuServe and eventually found its way onto the disks distributed by the Aldus Corporation. That virus was originally contained in a public-domain Hyper-Card
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stack that purported to discuss products that Apple had not yet announced.
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The virus flashed a screen message on a particular date and then deleted
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itself. Although it was not seriously harmful, the virus was an invasion and is reported to have caused problems with certain programs while it was present.
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There are confirmed reports of destructive IBM viruses too. Some of these programs apparently destroy data files or the entire contents of a hard-disk
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drive.
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To date, however, no case of a virus has cropped up on an Apple II program
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on any of the major national sevices such as GEnie, CompuServe, Delphi, BIX,
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ems. Some people claim that they know whose disks have been
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erased. People have mentioned that several programs may be infected, one of which is a bogus version of a prerelease commercial program.
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[]More next message[]
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[B1 #242 of 250] ? or Cmd [N]#
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9: Text Philez P-Z
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[UD:Punter][Unltd.Time][UnltdBlk]: |