Computer viruses
and other people's use of your computers

Lately, there has been (in my viewpoint) a rash of too much television watching, a majority of parents with no idea of how to raise their children to be able to accomplish their own goals, psychiatric drugs and their less dangerous cousins, the street drugs. These helped to bring about the recent adoption of the all-important "I" or "ME First" attitudes and the loss of the viewpoint of "Oh yes, there are others around me that I may want to live, work and play with."

Because of this, there are more people these days who waste their time and energy on attempts to destroy other people's computer data rather than attain the goals they once had when they were young. This situation is unfortunate, but currently a fact of all computer user's lives and therefore cannot be ignored.

Currently, there are two major types of external intrusion into your systems due to the above:

(1) COMPUTER VIRUSES
Viruses are programs created with the intention of anything from harmless pranks to out-and-out destruction of your hard-worked on data, your complete operating system and/or your motherboard. These are usually acquired by running a program with the virus already attached to it.

Please note: This can be a program or, yes, even an email you downloaded from the Internet, received from a friend on a floppy, CD or other disk or even bought from a respected (or otherwise) retailer.

Once run, depending on the virus, any other program run in that session will most likely be corrupted with the virus, along with the first part of your hard drive which is read when powering up your system. This last action ensures that the virus will always be in memory and able to infect any program you run.

Most small businesses are aware enough to have installed anti-virus software, however, most of you do not know that there are some 1-200 new viruses PER MONTH, and so, do not get your virus data files updated. This can cause major trouble down the road, especially if your backup system fails you or (hopefully not true) doesn't exist.

(2) TROJANS
The purpose of a trojan is just as it was in the days of the Greek and Trojan war. To get the enemy into your "camp" without your knowledge and do anything from poking around to stealing data to wreaking general havoc or just wiping out your systems. These are generally programs that can be sent into your computer once you are connected to the Internet and/or have been programmed into various purchased, shareware or freeware programs such as the recent event of a famous audio player program which was sending data from your system back to it's creator's server.

The way trojans work, you should first know that computers communicate over the Internet in a similar fashion to the FM band of your radio, the whole band. Usually, you have many stations on your FM band to choose from, correct? Ok. It is the same on the Internet. To the tune of over 65,535 channels called "ports". These ports are for the most part relegated to various jobs by the engineers that try to standardize the Internet and how computers communicate on it. For instance, when you browse the "web" you use port 80, when you send email from your system you use port 25, when you receive email into your system you use port 110, etc. However, not all ports are classified to what their purpose is or will be so there are a lot of "free" ports to play with.

Now, let us say that you want to communicate to another computer. You can use any of those free ports to send another system data, if that system was found to be accepting data on that port. And since most small business users don't know any better, they have no firewall (software or hardware to keep intruders out of your systems) or anti-trojan software installed on their systems.

For example, here is a typical situation:
An office decides it wants "fast Internet access" and orders a DSL or cable connection to the Internet with an Internet connection for every system on the network. Speed is nice, believe me, but this office is now wide open on around 60,000 ports to the outside world - on each computer connected to the Internet in this manner or many others - including modem connections! Not a pretty picture in the security crew's eyes I assure you.

How can your systems be protected? Most current anti-virus software protects your computers against some 45,000+ viruses, however, most current anti-virus software do not protect you against the 300+ trojans.

We can help.

SOLUTION
Los Angeles Computerhelp can install and maintain name-brand software that will protect your systems against trojans and viruses. The typical cost of a set of these software for the average Microsoft Windows 9x PC system is only around $1-200.00 depending on the brand of software and installation which would usually take less than a 20 minutes for both packages per system. Depending on your network, setup and configuration may take longer. We can also keep your systems updated with a monthly service contract so that you have less of a chance of becoming a victim to either one of these programs.

Call us today for a free quote!