In computer news this week, 05/10/2000

The Love bug virus - who's to blame? The hacker, the dumb computer, and the dumb human.

The Love bug virus is the most damaging computer virus to date; far worse than last year's Melissa virus and with damage estimates into the billions of dollars. Anyone using computers today should examine this virus scenario, to see what you can do to protect yourself when the next big virus comes down the internet.

The Lovebug preyed on the internet mail addiction phenomenom; which has been calculated to be 70 million American users whose primary use of the internet is to get email. You see, people fall in love with email and the internet. Take someone who has never touched a computer, give them a computer with an internet connection, and in a few months they'll be saying that they never knew how they got along without the internet and email in their lives before. It's tremendously addictive; you just can't resist opening an email addressed to you in your private mailbox. It would be the same if you opened your own snailmail box and saw a letter addressed to you that didn't look like junkmail; you just have to open it.

The creator of the lovebug virus preyed on people's email addiction. They knew that the majority of people can't resist opening email sent to them - by anyone. Then they worsened the situation by having the email be sent by someone you know - someone who had your email address already - so you felt good about opening it. Then the final hook was to show you that there was an attachment to the email that looked like a text file which was entitled - I love You. And millions of people clicked on this attachment and were infected with the Lovebug virus; which then took control of their computers and infected other people in a never-ending infection scheme.

What were the red flags you should have been watching for?

Probably the first might have been - why was there an attachment to the email ? If someone wants to say "I love you ", they could have said that in the email. An attachment to an email, or a hyperlink in an email - even from someone you know and trust - is potentially disasterous. Don't open or click on it if you don't know for sure what is going to happen. Resist the temptation. There's even an old fashioned device called a "telephone" that you can use to call the person who sent you the attachment and ask what it is. Or you could email them back.

The next very obvious clue was the name of the attachment, which was something like iloveyou.txt.vbs. To most computer users, they saw that as an innocent text file - recognizing the dot txt at the end of the file name as something they had probably received before without problems. They probably didn't notice or understand the dot vbs after that.

To computer professionals who understood that vbs meant the file was a visual basic script, that was a screaming red flag. There is no good reason at all for an I -love- you message to be in this file format. Obviously something is wrong with this picture.

And the virus took advantage of many things that are now built into windows and the internet explorer part of it. And when people clicked on it, the wheels started turning - the virus program made a call to a windows program that comes on your computer that will run visual basic scripts - and the virus took over your computer.

Without getting into technicalities of how and why things happen, you should immediately start protecting yourself - because it's going to happen again - I guarantee it. Don't open emails from people you don't know, and don't open attachments to any emails without knowing exactly what's going to happen.

For Raw Bytes, this is Frank Delaney

POB 222

Spangle, WA 99031

(509) 245-3736

fdspokane@aol.com