FAQ’s 101: What’s A Virus & What Does It Do?
By Darren Edwards

“To be true to its cause a virus is a piece of software written to disrupt your Mac's normal look, feel and routines without your permission [and in most cases without your knowledge or direction]”

The first thing to always remember if you get a virus is NOT to PANIC, if you do you might bin, crash or worse–loose massive amounts of data you have painstakingly put on your hard drive. Stay calm and think. But anyway–what the hell is a virus?

A virus is…?
Where ever we might have picked one up from, the underlaying fact is that a virus causes disruption. The levels of disruption is dictated by the wrath of the hell-bent programmer who spawned it. In simple terms the computer virus is written to mask its way on to your hard disk[s] and alter the running state of your machine. All a virus wants to do is spread systematically, replicate, multiply however you put it–it just wants to copy itself, damage and run.

Facts: 
Over the years I have found these three facts, the unwritten rule:

----The Cloak----
The virus needs to get its hands on your Mac, it will use any means possible such as:
• Attaching itself to email
• Trojan horse application masking
• Files, text or pictures

A Trojan horse is an application masking/carrying the virus, i.e. [one I have had before is a good example] a Printer driver Extension put in your System folder only to find your Mac’s icons next time you start up are all replaced by a winking skull and cross bones, with the message ‘have a nice day’ under my trash can icon! This was played as a simple ‘joke’ on me some years ago. 
The only problem with the joke was that the Extension replaced my own printer Extension and permanently damaged my trash can icon. I needed to replace my printer software and then a clean install due to secondary unforeseen problems. It’s no joke when you work horse Mac gets tampered with, wasting time and in many cases money.

----The Trigger----
Always there is a ‘trigger’. The trigger is the launch of the host or Trojan horse or software the virus has attached itself to.

----The Damage----
Whatever the after effect, damage of some magnitude is inflicted, some examples of this could be:
• Messages like “are you having a nice day”. [Not really my system is now in need of repair]
• Flashing, blinking, colour changes, icon changes
• General misbehavior by your normally calm Mac
• File corruption, deleting or alteration
• Crashes, freezes and unrequested restarts

The damage factor:
On a lighter note us lucky Mac users don’t have too many viruses hanging about, but they still need to be taken seriously.

Try to asses the damage caused by lack of prevention. 
Example scenario:
A design company has a rush project to finish for a customer. The deadline is 24 hours away [rush projects are always 24 hours away], so far there has been 150 hours work put in to the project. Two of the artworkers are working from home, only coming in to hand work in or send the files via email.

The last piece of the customer's portfolio is on a zip disk from one of the artworkers who works from home. He does not use an anti-virus program as he thinks his Mac is fine. The company has three Mac's two have an anti-virus programs and all have their data backed up every 12 hours.

Ok here is the sucker punch. The artworker puts his disk in the Mac without the anti-virus software. All the Mac's are networked together but no one has bothered to set up protective areas such as System folder scans. It’s been 11 hours since the last back up. The artworkers disk has a virus he picked up from downloading example art work from his own personal site he lets his mates upload/download too. He copies the file to the other two networked Mac's and then he opens the infected files and wham, things start going wrong.

A simple example of some [many] companies lack of policy pertaining to employees media and protecting their machines correctly.

Add the smoke and the fire will follow, you never know.

Tom Martin 
Tom's on holiday [damn] so I'm filling in this month while he lives it up, I don't know, writers eh!
-Darren