Okay, pop quiz. Which of these "computer virus alerts" is genuine?
If you chose (3), congratulations! The Word.Concept virus really exists. The rest are simply virus hoaxes, designed to frighten you. As a general rule of thumb, you needn't worry about a virus alert, especially if you receive the alert on April Fool's Day.
So...if you ever receive e-mail messages from your girlfriend's mother's cousin, who forwarded a chain letter alert, which came from her dentist, who got it from a podiatrist, who got it from his secretary's daughter, who supposedly received it at college directly from IBM's virus experts, urging you to forward the message to everyone you know, don't panic! Genuine virus alerts don't ask you to participate in a chaotic e-mail distribution scheme.
According to the SANS (System Administration, Networking, and Security) Institute, a cooperative research and education organization, the #1 virus transmission method in recent years has been via exchanging Microsoft Office documents, which can contain viruses hidden in macros written in Visual Basic, and some hoax alerts include generic links to respected government agenices, or Microsoft, or some other legitimate entity.
To ascertain whether a message you receive contains a real threat, you can visit any number of computer myth-related web sites -- http://vmyths.com is an excellent one -- or forward the information to Academic Computing Services' Help Desk by sending electronic mail to consult@rpi.edu. Do not forward the message to everyone you know without first checking its authenticity! To do so is simply forwarding what is essentially useless chainmail.
Rensselaer has a university site license for the Norton Anti-Virus software, and the best protection you have against any possible computer viruses is to be viligant about updating your virus-scanning software.
For more information about computer virus hoaxes, please visit http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org and http://vmyths.com.
As long as we're talking about viruses, here's a simple step you can take to make sure that you don't open a certain type of file: show the complete file extensions on your laptop or Windows desktop machine.
To do this, first double-click on the My Computer or Windows Explorer icon on your machine's desktop, select a disk (for example, your C: hard drive), and then select a folder on that disk. Pull down the View menu and select Folder Options... In the separate View Options window that appears, left-click on the View tab, and select the Show all files option (if it isn't already). Finally, ensure that a checkmark does not appear to the left of the "Hide file extensions for known file types" option.
Taking this precaution is really important when you don't want to open a certain type of file, especially to avoid spreading a virus. A good example is with the Anna Kournikova virus that recently affected campus; if you don't show complete file extensions on your machine, the virus file appears as a simple .JPG file, and you don't see that the file really has the .VBS extension.
So, do yourself a favor and take a minute to show the complete file extensions
on your laptop of Windows desktop!
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