By Colleen Bohen
University students received an e-mail on Wednesday, March 10, which warned about the dangers of a new a computer virus called “W32/Beagle.j@MM.”
The warning said that the “virus spreads through e-mail and peer-to-peer file sharing networks, such as Kazaa, iMesh, Bearshare, and Limeware.”
Students have reported receiving messages infected with the virus from “spoofed” e-mail addresses that incorporate the University’s web address. One such address was “[email protected].”
Patrick Vaughan, a technician for Res-Net said, “spoofing” occurs when the virus is coded to borrow web addresses and “make an e-mail look like something that the person receiving it would want.”
This misleads the recipient into thinking that the e-mail is from a trustworthy source, and the virus is able to attack the computer once the e-mail is opened.
The viruses are spread when someone creates them and then releases them into the Internet usually through a mass e-mail or in a file-sharing program, Vaughan said. The viruses spread quickly because they are coded to keep replicating and re-distributing themselves automatically by attaching to the address book in your hard drive.
Most of the newer viruses are not developed to attack an individual’s computer, but rather to use the person’s computer as a mean to their own ends, Vaughan said.
Viruses are actually developed as a “denial of service attack (DOS),” where the virus enters your computer, takes over your hard-drive and uses it as a vehicle to send requests to shut down a certain site.
“Most really don’t hurt the computers anymore though,” Vaughan said.
The recent virus “MyDoom” had numerous different versions that were aimed to shut down sites like the Microsoft website.
The University provides McAfee virus-protection software that is available to all students on the University’s web site at no cost.
Rudis Mata, a freshman accounting major said that his computer got a virus last semester.
“It’s a good thing that they [the University] give you the anti-virus software,” he said.
The McAfee software picked up on the virus and “took care of it,” he said. Mata hasn’t had any real problems since and that is not too worried about it.
“I just try not to download too much,” he said.
Not all students share Mata’s position on the anti-virus software.
Junior computer science major, John Klein said he feels “it (the software) is not good at all. “It doesn’t really protect against that much because you can still pick up pretty much anything while on the Internet.”
Despite his feelings on the software, Klein said that he is still not that worried about getting a computer virus. “I know what to download and what not to download,” he said.
Laurie Harvey, the Assistant Dean of Student Computer Services and Help Desk Services said that students should be very careful about using peer-to-peer file-sharing services like Kazaa. She said programs like Spyware and Adware tend to get downloaded to a computer once it has downloaded one of those services.
Those additional programs are dangerous because they allow your hard-drive to automatically download materials that could be potentially harmful to you computer, and they allow outsiders to have access to the contents on your hard drive as well.
“Most people don’t realize that by agreeing to join these services, they are also agreeing to allow anyone to anyone to take whatever they want off of your hard-drive,” Harvey said.
If students already have Spyware and Adware on their computers, there are ways to get rid of them. Harvey recommended downloading software from sites such as www.lavasoftusa.com and www.safer-networking.org. There is software available that will help students to rid their computers of these potentially harmful programs.
