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Guarding against e-ttacks
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May 5, 2000: 5:38 p.m. ET
Anti-virus software, firewalls and caution can protect your computer
By Staff Writer Steve Bills
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - The "I Love You" e-mail virus and its copycats seem to be wreaking the greatest damage on large corporate computer networks with late-model operating systems, but you should still consider the security of your home and small-business PCs, experts say.
"Even though this one may soon fade from the headlines, it may reemerge six months from now," said Tim Mather of Symantec Corp. (SYMC: Research, Estimates), maker of the Norton Anti-Virus software. He also noted that older viruses remain at large, even though their prominence has faded.
Be e-xtra careful with e-mail
As a first step, you should be careful about the e-mails you receive, especially when it comes to opening the attachments. While the initial publicity involved the title of the e-mail, the "I love you" or "Joke" message line, that is not a reliable way to guard against infection.
 The current round of viruses are scripts written using Visual Basic software, giving the attachments a characteristic .vbs file extension.
Other executable -- and potentially dangerous -- files include .exe and .com formats, the experts say. Like bullets, if you click on them, they can fire.
Visual Basic scripting is a feature of Windows 98 and later versions of the Microsoft operating system, but it does not function automatically in Windows 95 or earlier versions. The "love" virus and its variants also target Microsoft Outlook e-mail, which is widely used in corporate networks.
As a result, the virus "will tear through an organization very quickly because it has a high-performance server and a very large address book," said Chris Rouland of ISS Group (ISSX: Research, Estimates), an Internet security specialist.
Nor can you trust the source of a message. These viruses propagate themselves, in part, by reading the victim's e-mail address book and sending themselves to the people on that list. Thus, you could receive a message from a trusted co-worker or friend, but the contents may be self-replicating copies of the malicious code.
"Now, the love letter appears to be from somebody you know, so that makes it even worse," said Greg Gilliom, president of Network ICE, a maker of intrusion detection software.
All of this is complicated to understand, difficult to remember, and challenging to discipline yourself to do, so experts recommend you use anti-virus software like that provided by Symantec or McAfee.com Corp. (MCOM: Research, Estimates).
Keep virus software current
If you use anti-virus software, however, you must keep it current. New infections emerge on the Internet all the time. The "love" bug, for instance, followed the sunrise from Asia to Europe and the Americas on Thursday, causing widespread problems in a very short time. The copycats also followed quickly.
This has kept programmers busy writing software to catch the proliferating bugs. At Symantec, for instance, virus updates usually go up on the Web site once a week, Mather said, but in response to this fast-moving threat, "We did one yesterday, and we are doing another one that will go up around noon today," he said Friday.
If your software provider offers automatic updates -- and the big ones do -- it would be prudent to subscribe. Such software inoculations offer your best protection against infection.
Beyond that, to improve your computer security, you should consider a firewall for your PC or network, especially if you have an "always-on" Internet connection, such as a DSL telephone line or a cable modem. According to International Data Corp., 50 percent of large businesses and 41 percent of medium-size companies will have such defenses by the end of the year, but only 14 percent of small firms will have them.
Now you are guarding, not against e-mail viruses, but against hackers who might try to break into your system from outside.
"A virus, you invite in. If you don't open the love letter, you don't get the virus," said Gilliom of Network ICE. "The other side of the coin is a hacker."
Firewalls protect against hackers
Most computer users who install firewalls do so because they fear the loss of personal information -- such as their computerized financial records -- to an online snoop, but experts say that risk is relatively small.
"If a hacker wants a credit card number, he should go to the dumpster behind a restaurant" or hit a commercial e-commerce site, Gilliom said
The greater risk is that electronic intruders will hijack your system to attack other computers and you will get the blame. This strategy was employed in the February "denial-of-service" attacks for which a Canadian youth was arrested in April. Authorities believe the teenager planted code in remote systems, primarily university networks, from which he unleashed torrents of traffic that swamped the servers of some Internet sites, including CNN.com.
The risk of such hijacking is greater for high-bandwidth users for at least two reasons, the experts note -- not only does the faster connection increase the capacity that the hacker can use to do mischief, but also the cable modem or digital service line has a fixed Internet address, which makes it easier for a troublemaker to find, compared with the dial-up user, who connects to a different line each time he calls his Internet service provider.
"I personally run a DSL connection, and I get probed all the time," said Rouland of ISS.
Back up your files
As a final precaution, you should make it a point to back up important files frequently, the experts say. This protects vital personal or business information, whether from a virus, a disk crash, or some other calamity.
You don't need to do a full back up of your hard drive -- although that is a good idea, too. If you lose your "Quake" game, or your word processor, you can reload the software. But if you lose your checkbook register, or your customer mailing list, it could be difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct.
And keep that backup disk in a location away from your computer. You would hate to go to the trouble of duplicating the files, only to lose both the main system and the backups to a fire. 
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