What does antivirus software do?

There are a variety of antivirus software packages that operate in many different ways, depending on how the vendor chose to implement their software. What they have in common, though, is that they all look for patterns in the files or memory of your computer that indicate the possible presence of a known virus. Antivirus packages know what to look for through the use of virus profiles (sometimes called "signatures") provided by the vendor.

New viruses are discovered daily. The effectiveness of antivirus software is dependent on having the latest virus profiles installed on your computer so that it can look for recently discovered viruses. It is important to keep these profiles up to date.

More information about viruses and antivirus software can be found on the CERT Computer Virus Resource page
http://www.cert.org/other_sources/viruses.html

F-Secure Patches multiple vulnerabilities in Products.

Finnish security vendor F-Secure has patched multiple vulnerabilities in its software, including a buffer overflow vulnerability affecting a number of its products.

The buffer overflow vulnerability lies in the processing of LHA archives and may allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code or create a denial-of-service condition. This flaw is related to a similar problem discovered last fall involving the way the Gzip decompression utility handles LZH-compressed archives, F-Secure officials said in an advisory.

"An attacker may create a specially crafted LHA archive, which then in its decompression phase exploits the described buffer overflow vulnerability, allowing arbitrary code to be executed or the exploit to create a denial-of-service condition," said officials at the Helsinki, Finland-based company.

The bug affects F-Secure's Anti-Virus, Internet Gatekeeper and Internet Security product suites.

Two other vulnerabilities were patched Wednesday as well. One is an IOCTL (Input/Output Control) vulnerability in the Real-time Scanning component of F-Secure workstation and file server products for Windows. An attacker with local access to the system can escalate their privileges to the system with a specially crafted IRP (I/O request packet) due to improper access validation of the address space used by Real-time Scanning, company officials said.

The final flaw patched Wednesday is a bug in F-Secure's Policy Manager Server that could be used by attackers to launch a denial-of-service attack. A DoS condition can be triggered by using NTFS-reserved words as URL filenames, company officials warned. France-based security research organization FrSIRT rates this particular flaw, which is remotely exploitable, as low risk.

By Brian Prince www.eweek.com

Virus Nightmare..Lessons Learned

I got a virus the other day, Thursday I believe and since then I have been making FRANTIC efforts to save all my info.

The most important thing for me to save are my Outlook Express emails and my Roboform passwords. That way I can at least access all the places I need, to download and re-install all the software I use.

Thankfully I was able to still access my Laptop and very, very slowly(the system was painfully slow because of the damge done by the virus) start a process of trying to save my system without having to reformat the whole disk. I say thankfully because after a virus attack not everyone is able to even access the system.

I tried anti-virus software, I attempted to fix things using the various "malicious advertising" expulsion applications(Ad-aware, Spybot etc.). All to no avail. After almost three days I resigned myself to the fact that it would have to be a re-format which means restoring my Laptop to factory settings. What a nightmare!

First of all I made a backup of my Outlook express email software, emails, account settings etc. For this I downloaded a great little free trial software application called Outlook Express Back Up Wizard, a free trial can be downloaded here:
http://www.outlook-express-backup.com/ This software met by needs better than others I tried.

If you don't use Outlook Express then you can download others by searching here:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=RNWE,RNWE:2004-35,RNWE:en&q=email+backup+free+downloads

The I did a search for some backup software to back up the files that I could and also to use for future occasions. After trying a few that either wouldn't work on my system, or didn't back up to the medium that I wanted(CD Rom Discs) I found a great tool that just did the trick and in fact I plan to buy as soon as the free trial is up. The software is called "NTI Backup Now 4 Deluxe Suite" and it is so straightforward that even a tech dummy like me found it simple.

Again you can use the full version for 30 days free:
http://www.ntius.com/

I added my Roboform(www.roboform.com) passwords, my Internet Explorer favourites, my Outlook Express backup, my Microsoft Money backup files(For accounting purposes), as many software installation files as I had and most of the files and folders that I have used recently.

Of course what I also ralised is that I have not kept the Install files of loads of the software that I have on my Laptop. Bad mistake! This means that I will have to go search for these again to download to my reformatted system.

What I will do in future is save every Install file in it's own folder with passwords, serial numbers and any other useful info in a notepad file alongside them.

The hard lesson I have learned is to make sure in future I do frequent backups of my system. I have been online since 1998 and never had any major problems. This is the first and I foolishly underestimated the damage a virus could do.

My next step is to get an external drive to use as a backup and as I mentioned to use it frequently.

I hope this has given you some food for thought. As I sign off here I am going to insert my Toshiba Product Recovery CD-Rom.

If I had taken the necessary precautions I wouldn't have just lost three days of my time. Three days I could have been putting to better use.

Ah well, there is positive in every bad situation. Or at least that's what I keep telling myself:-).

Mal Keenan is editor and publisher of Home Business Tips Newsletter:
http://www.home-business-tips-newsletter.com/
For more help and support from Mal Keenan visit his online training site:
http://www.pluginprofitstraining.com

Update F-Secure Virus Definitions November 01, 2006

Latest virus definitions for F-Secure Anti-Virus 5 and F-Secure Anti-Virus 4.

Whenever a new virus is found, the databases need to be updated for F-Secure Anti-Virus to be able to detect it.

F-Secure Anti-Virus offers an easy to use protection against viruses for your PC.

With F-Secure Anti-Virus you can open e-mail attachments and use your computer without fear of virus infections. You can also be sure that you are not sending viruses to others.

Just install and forget, F-Secure Anti-Virus will automatically keep viruses away from your computer.

Download and execute the FSUpdate utility. Note, that to update the databases again, you need to download the utility again.