Computer virus can open you up for all to see

THOMPSON E-mail: Click here

© St. Petersburg Times
published January 12, 2002

I'd heard of viruses, of course, but, like the flu, you don't know what it's like until you get it yourself.

At first I didn't know what it was.

I received an e-mail from a New York friend, and long-time ago boyfriend, in response to an e-mail I'd sent to him.

He wrote: "This accidentally came to me though it's, of course, meant for someone else whom you'll want to recontact."

The message he was responding to read like this: "Almost. And you said nothing, even though you could smell the fear on her. Why does she have to keep bringing up Russell? You wonder how long you're going to stay mad at him. Forever, maybe. It doesn't matter anymore. That was then. Going back isn't going to make it any harder, or any easier, to forget."

This had come to him with the subject line: "You and your sweet."

Then, an e-mail from another friend arrived. His message: "Sandra, where are you? I got part, two paragraphs, of an interesting essay having to do with Lord Nelson and the nearby Parliament."

Another friend just returned my e-mail with the message, "Wazzis?"

Groan.

Finally a message from a computer-savvy friend told me I had a virus, get rid of it.

Then an e-mail turned up that referred to a small town in Illinois no one has ever heard of where my mother was born, and I thought, omigod, someone is in there who really KNOWS me. How else could they get this information?

I felt invaded. I called my husband at the office, where he has access to people who know about computers. He told me that the virus was randomly sending out pieces from our files.

My files? That's like tapping into my brain. At first the messages had been too truncated to recognize, but now I realized the Lord Nelson thing was from an article my husband had written about Barbados. What if the virus had sent something decipherable and, well, ugly to just the right person?

E-mails kept tumbling in, asking, what's going on? Of course I couldn't reply -- and risk infecting them.

That night my husband ran a program called Housecall, a sort of virtual antibiotic, and knocked out the virus. But not before the virus had knocked out a bunch of our programs. Like the one where you can e-mail everyone in your address book at the same time. So he sent e-mail warnings to 80 people separately.

And I had to take the computer into the shop, have it worked on and a Norton Anti-Virus program installed. Norton had saved most of our correspondents from infection, but it got in and messed up a few who had no, or an antiquated, antivirus program.

Who would do something like this? Just screw up someone's life a little, cost him a little time, a little money, some anguish?

Probably a kid, said my expert, a student in the computer crimes program at USF I see on his day job. So I guess it's the virtual version of my younger brothers shooting BB guns at cars from on top of a viaduct or wrapping toilet paper between two trees across a street.

There are different types of viruses, said our future computer cop. He thought mine was probably a worm, a relatively harmless form. He said it probably wasn't personal; if someone had wanted to go after me, they'd have used a deadlier virus like a Trojan Horse (which imitates a regular file to get in, then opens up and starts doing damage), or Clean Slate, which can erase your hard drive.

Can you still buy fake vomit? My brothers liked that one, it's pretty harmless but you get to see people grossed out.

- Sandra Thompson is a writer who lives in Tampa. She can be reached at tampa@sptimes.com. City Life appears on Saturday.

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