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Strategies & Market Trends : LastShadow's Position Trading -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: R Hamilton who wrote (185)	9/3/1998 11:59:00 AM
From: LastShadow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 43080

BBY and Viruses BBY - oops, yes, sorry, 49.5 Viruses: One can get a virus by downloading something from the interent. Just by visiting an URL one can get a virus placed on your system in the same manner as a cookie is loaded onto your site. Use a virus scan and don't decompress something if you don't know what it is. If you turn off cookie acceptance, or set it to accept only if idata goes back to originator you will do a lot to prevent the latter, although I haven't come across anyone who obtained a virus that way. With respect to my specific download for web query files for Excel 97, it only contains files and not executables (*.exe) and as such could not carry a virus. The particular one I have is w32.cih.spacefiller which is somewhat benign in that all it does is add a few lines of code to the executable strings of programs, thereby taking up space. It was developed a year or so in Taiwan and took about a week to go global. It does not delete any files or cause any permanent damage (except for the waste of time I will have reloading Windows and over 250 programs) . In general, one does not want to download freeware or shareware programs from non-secure or unknown websites, but merely by visiting them you are not at risk. Yes, there is the cabability out there to create such a virus, but every isp I know goes to great lengths to track those provisional sites down and block them. The warez sites are notorious for this because anyone can upload to most of them, and they get a lot of traffic from (mostly) kids looking to get free hacked copies of everything from mp3 files (music from CDs) Photoshop to Games to Windows 98. My son knows sites where there are over 80 Gbs of programs availabe for download. These sites exist as legal 'backup' drives for the owners, but with the web access is available to anyone who knows how to use the search and download software. And no, I wont tell anyone what is is or where you can get it, so don't bother asking... I know of at least three companies who have active personell whose sole job is to find those sites and shut them down electronically (including infecting viruses on them). After all, if you are Adobe and someone is giving away free hacked copies of $500 software packages, you tend to lose your humor. There is even a Microsoft encryption key program that generates valid decryption keys for their software suites. I think some disgruntled ex-MS troops built that one. lastshadow