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This Week: Viruses and Social Networks
President Elect Ken McQualter (right) stepped to the podium to introduce this week's speaker on computer viruses since President Bill Goodwin was attending the national conference in Perth. He slipped neatly into the role he will assume later this year deftly introducing a speaker who raised the constant worry of anyone using the internet today.
Social networking was one of the easiest ways to pick up an internet virus on a computer, the computer virus expert from AVG systems told the Tuesday meeting. ``They could be worms, trojans or attempts to steal bank account or credit card numbers,’’ said James Caldwell (below) computer-guru son of Rotary Club of Balwyn member, Marc Caldwell.
The project manager of technical systems at AVG, a world-wide anti-virus company based in the Czech republic, James said that more recent mal-ware writers - people writing viruses for computers - were finding ways to monetise their work. Some companies now banned employees from social networking on a company’s computer despite evidence that normal office work speeded up 15 per cent when employees were allowed access in work time to social networks such as Facebook or Twitter.
Some schemes asked people to give $20 for a fake security filter – and then cleaned out the credit cards with which they had paid the $20, James warned. With 150,000 new malware viruses appearing daily, the task for anti-virus writers may seem impossible, he said. Some of the malware was written for the satisfaction of a hacker trying to get into difficult to access computers while others were written to get into computers to take them over. Then perhaps it could be made to contact all the people on the computer’s stored address book.
It was, however, possible to resist 150,000 new virus programs a day if the new anti-virus system was organised to look for a pattern of information behaviour behind the malware. ``It might be seeking to get a 12 figure number from an internet user – a bank account or credit card – and this aim could be detected,’’ he said.
Things to watch for were invitations to download free material such as an upgrade for a system already on a computer. These invitations had to be carefully searched to make sure the security upgrade was genuine. Malware would slow down a computer and the writers of the malware could then offer to speed up the slower computer through the help of a speed upgrade. It worked, too, speeding up the computer, he added, but the malware would then be installed as well. Most operating systems had anti-virus mechanisms but the ``bad guys’’ found ways around them requiring patches from the maker of the software system being used.
It was a mistake to think that Mac computers were superior to PC computers in resisting the malware.
``There are fewer Macs than PCs and thus fewer people writing malware for them because the `bad guys’ could make a bigger impact with the greater number of PCs in use,’’ he explained. Some of the `bad guys’ wrote anti-virus programs for computers in which they had buried their own malware as well as the anti-virus program.
The most important point to remember was to have up to date anti-virus material. How deeply this helped depended to some extent on whether it was free or not, the paid-for fixes for anti-virus programs working deeper and better at their task.
``Be careful what you click on. Make sure you read all the text supplied with the threat warning. Watch for genuine updates to programs, enhance firewalls and use good anti-malware software,’’ he said.
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