Computer viruses and you

Computer viruses are a problem for everyone, even if you do not realise it yet!  For the pedantic I am lumping up all forms of Malware into that as most non geek people do not distinguish.  Make no mistake nowadays these things are out for your credit card number, if you have a disk failure or virus outbreak that suggests that you need to “buy the pro version” to fix or eradicate it then you are almost certainly interacting with some malware.  Give them your credit card number at your peril.

It occurred to me that people try to think about these things like the biological equivalent but I think that bacteria may be a better model.   For example if someone handed you a lovely piece of chocolate you would look at its brown loveliness and eat it, gaining the bit of happiness you expected.  What would you do if someone handed you that bit of chocolate with the same promise of happiness but it was covered in a blue mold?  Would you eat anyway in the hope of a bit of happiness?  Would you be more or less likely to eat this if it was a good friend that gave it to you?  What about if it was in a box with your good friends name on it?  Would you ignore the blue and eat?

I hope you see what I am getting at here, if you replace the chocolate with a file representing “this will make you laugh” you start to realise the problem, you cannot see the computer virus but that file may well in reality be covered in mold.  The escalating situations with the moldy chocolate represent the escalating suspicion with which you would treat it. if I had used cheese instead of chocolate for my example and a friend offered it directly you would eat it, though probably hesitantly, because you trust your friend but you’d be unlikely to do so if it was offered in a dark alley by a stranger.

The avoidance of bad food is something we are all trained into from a really young age and we tend to stick with stuff we know and not experiment on our own.  This keeps us safe in general, although not without the occasional jippy tummy.  IT professionals and IT aware people are also pretty good at avoiding malware in much the same way just because they recognise more clearly the circumstances in which it may occur and avoid them.  Those that do not recognise it but flag unusual behaviour to someone that may know more can also avoid malware more often than not.   Even these people though will end up with the malware equivalent of a jippy tummy now and again (ref: my sons currently infected profile on his computer that I keep caged to study ;-)  )

And like bacteria there are lots and lots of different kinds of malware and growing numbers of writers of this type of software.  You cannot assume that Anti-virus vendors are capable of holding back the tide, defend yourself and your company by assuming that everything is out to get you until proven otherwise.