Worms
Worms and Trojans
What are they?
Worms are something very new, and they are getting very dangerous in nature. From the Melissa to the Love Letter Worms, they are getting more and more sophisticated and difficult to stop. As with all of our pages I could go into a long drawn out discussion about how these worms are written and how each and every one functions, but you will quickly find yourself surfing somewhere else. So I will be brief and hopefully won't loose you all in the discussion. I invite you though, if you want to know more about these worms or Trojans, please email me at: Worm Info
Now without further delay; what are worms? Worms are programs usually created in Visual Basic? Did you say VB? Yes, good ole Visual Basic. Microsoft's nice program to help programmers build easier and better programs. It is a program to build programs. Most, I say, most worms, are usually in VBS extensions. Although all worms do something somewhat different than the other, they mostly infect one computer and their typical function is to spread to other computers by using the Send Mail feature via Outlook or Outlook Express (usually thru MAPI).
Most worms email a copy of itself to every person in your address book without you knowing about it. That is their primary function. Some are of course, more destructive than others. Mostly what people who are infected find, that their email servers get clogged up, and bandwidth on their networks are slowed to a crawl. This is done by worms sucking up bandwidth by sending themselves to everyone in your address book. The Melissa virus was one of the first viruses to use this type of transport for infection. For your info: when the Melissa virus was first discovered I personally made a statement, I said, "Oh boy, this opens up an entire new door for viruses to travel and we will see more and more of these types of virus. We will also see some with destructive capabilities". Yes, I made that statement as most did when they saw this new type of virus in action. And yes, it has come true.
Let's take the Love Letter Virus. Actually there are about 5 different versions of this, but the latest one, does exactly as the Melissa virus did. It sends a copy of itself in a VBS program, once executed on the computer it changes all JPEG among other files, to VBS extensions and completely destroys the actual file. The only thing you can do is to delete the file and hope for a backup.
Well get ready cause there will more of these types of viruses to come and they will be becoming more destructive as programmers chose to write them.
Well I can go on and on about Worms and tell you about some really neato functions that they do, I say neato, cause we can't get some programs to do what these things do. The general rule of thumb used to be: "if you see an email from someone you don't know don't open it". Now that does not hold true, because now you can receive an email from your best buddy, and it could be a worm or a Trojan. The only solution is to keep those virus scanners updated regularly. We are all at risk. I run virus scanners religiously at our office, and just the other day, a "backdoor Trojan" was found on our network. It was actually an Active X back door tool, that was most likely designed in Visual Basic. Our virus scanner at least caught it, and isolated it so that our other computer were not infected, but still all in all, everyone is prone.
If you would like to be added to our virus list to obtain the latest info about when to update your virus scanners, I invite you to write to us to: