These Days, Even Well Protected Isn’t Safe Enough
If only that problem on my hard drive were a bad sector.
But no--I have a computer virus.
This is humiliating for me, given my history of finger-wagging to friends, colleagues, readers and total strangers on the importance of practicing good computer hygiene.
I consider myself a poster child for safe computing. My personal computer systems are loaded with doodads that monitor what the programs on my boxes are doing and create a log and alert me to any attempt by some seemingly innocuous software to, uh, say, connect to the Web and download child pornography.
I’ve got a live, up-to-date copy of all the major anti-viral programs. I scan everything that comes in. As a general rule, I don’t open e-mail attachments. But if I need to, I open them on what I call the garbage box, a computer that isn’t connected to anything and has no sensitive information on it.
I take these precautions because when I started writing about the Internet a decade ago, I focused on security. This annoyed some people, who subjected me to a series of electronic attacks that I managed, largely through dumb luck, to sidestep or defuse. I’ve received hundreds--maybe thousands--of viruses, worms and Trojan horses on my systems, but until now I’ve always managed to disarm these bombs before they went off.
So you can imagine my embarrassment when I infected my office computer with a virus I was trying to help a reader get rid of.
The afflicted fellow said his system was having all these weird crashes. He didn’t give me a lot of information, but his note did contain three key letters: MTX.
The MTX virus seemed the most likely cause of his misery, so I spent some time researching the virus, including visiting underground Internet sites, nosing around for information about how this thing worked and what could be done about it.
In this case, the research turned out to be something of a mistake. In the course of my digging, I somehow managed to launch a copy of the virus on my office computer.
I’m still not entirely sure how it happened, though I’m guessing that at some point I tried to delete a file and accidentally launched it instead.
Now, it’s true that people who work with this stuff always run the hazard of shooting themselves in the foot.
“I nailed myself good about two years ago,” said William J. Orvis, senior security specialist for the Energy Department’s Computer Incident Advisory Center. “It’s not hard. You just kick yourself a couple of times and then clean up the mess.”
Of course, he has a much better excuse than I do, because he’s got thousands of viruses sitting around, not just in a locked cabinet but on his computer.
Still, it’s a little funny. Motoaki Yamumura, group development manager for Symantec’s anti-viral research center, chuckled when I told him what had happened. “I really shouldn’t be laughing,” he said.
Too late.
Yamumura told me there are about 55,000 known viruses, but only about 300 active in the field. MTX--which is technically more of a worm than a virus because it can do things such as propagate itself via e-mail--remains one of the biggest problems on the Internet more than a year after it was released.
In part, that’s because it’s stealthy.
“It was actually written by somebody who knows how to program,” said Vincent Gullotto, senior director of McAfee’s Anti-Virus Emergency Response Team.
One particularly nasty attribute of this pest is that it doesn’t allow your Web browsing software to connect to Web sites, such as McAfee’s, to download the tools you can use to dislodge the pest from your box.
Although my face is a bit red, this isn’t a catastrophe for me because I regularly back up the stuff I can’t afford to lose off my computer.
I hope you’ll learn from my problem. Your computer will fail, for some reason out of your control. The only way to preserve the information you can’t afford to lose is to make backups.
Here endeth the lesson.
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Dave Wilson is The Times’ personal technology columnist.
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* Dave Wilson answers reader questions in Tech Q&A.; T6
