OK. Let's clear the air right from the start. Me, the computer guru, the person you come to for help and advice, got the recent Love Bug. And it hurt. Bad.
The "Love Bug' virus outbreak last week thankfully was not as bad as it could have been. The original virus only deleted photo and music files (and some other more obscure files), and it only spread through the Microsoft Outlook program (big brother of Outlook Express), which is mostly used only by large businesses. Believe me, it could have been much more destructive and much more widespread. Unfortunately, some derivative viruses have been created which are more destructive. This is a time to be careful about reading e-mail. More on that later.
I was caught off guard. I usually read the online computer news and alerts, and if I had done that prior to reading my e-mail I would have known. I didn't. The e-mail I got was from a known friend so I trusted it. Wrong move. In my case, I saw the virus start to work, and was able to stop it from sending out any e-mail infecting all of my friends. But I could not stop it before it destroyed the thousands of photos and music files on my hard drive. What now?
In my last column, I spoke of how important it was to have backups. It took me hours, but I was able to first clean the virus off my hard drive, restore almost all the photos from backup CD-ROM, and recover the music files (they were not actually erased, just hidden). I was able to get some of the compromised system files from my laptop. The only thing I lost was about two weeks worth of photos (nothing serious) that I had not yet backed up. I did have to reinstall some software that used a lot of image files.
The message here should be clear: if even I could get hit, you can to. Here are some steps to protect your PC. Use a virus checking program and get frequent virus definition updates for it. There are a number of these programs and they are all good. The Love Bug got past my virus checker because it didn't know about that particular virus, but it does check for it now.
This type of virus travels as an attachment to e-mail. First, be suspicious of any unsolicited e-mail - if you don't know who sent it, it's probably spam or junk. Second, don't open AT ALL any e-mail that has an attachment unless you know specifically that the sender sent it to you. It would be better to wait and ask the sender if they sent it, rather than opening it right away.
Most importantly, you need good backups. This is just about the only way to restore files that have been erased. It would be better to keep more than one set of backups in case the most recent set is also infected.
These are not good times. But I think the industry is learning and improving with respect to viruses and we should see better protection systems in the future.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).