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...cell and trick it into making thousands of flawless replicas of the original virus. Like its biological counterpart, a computer virus carries in its instructional code the recipe for making perfect copies of itself. Lodged in a host computer, the typical virus takes temporary control of the computer's disk operating system. Then, whenever the infected computer comes in contact with an uninfected piece of software, a fresh copy of the virus passes into the new program. Thus the infection can be spread from computer to computer by unsuspecting users who either swap disks or send programs to one another...
...what made this virus special was how it spread. Brandow, who collaborated with Davidson in creating it, inserted the virus into game disks that were distributed at meetings of a Montreal Macintosh users group. A speaker at one meeting was a Chicago software executive named Marc Canter, whose company was doing some contract work for Aldus Corp., a Seattle-based software publisher. Canter innocently picked up a copy of the infected disk, tried it out on his office computer, and then proceeded, on the same machine, to review a piece of software being prepared for shipment to Aldus. Unaware that...
Meanwhile, entrepreneurs eager to profit from the epidemic have rushed to market with all sorts of programs designed to protect against viruses. In , advertising that frightens more than it informs, they flog products with names like Flu Shot +, Vaccinate, Data Physician, Disk Defender, Antidote, Virus RX, Viru-Safe and Retro-V. "Do computer viruses really exist? You bet they do!" screams a press release for Disk Watcher 2.0, a product that supposedly prevents virus attacks. Another program, VirALARM, boasts a telling feature: it instructs an IBM PC's internal speaker to alert users to the presence of a viral intruder...
...concern that the computer revolution, like the sexual revolution, is threatened by viruses. At Apple, a company hit by at least three different viral strains, employees have been issued memos spelling out "safe computing practices" and reminded, as Product Manager Michael Holm puts it, "If you get a floppy disk from someone, remember that it's been in everybody else's computer...
...buying by those who have already been hit," says William Agne, president of ComNetco, which publishes Viru- Safe. When a virus showed up at the University of Delaware, the assistant manager of academic computing services immediately bought six different pieces of antiviral software. Then she began screening every floppy disk on campus -- some...