Effectiveness of Virus Scan Concept virus

[Jay Ward]

> Our networking folks came by today and installed Virus Scan 2.0 from
> Macafee to deal with it.  According to them, there are now a series
> of macro viruses that may infect Word files.  You can set Virus Scan
> to automatically scan the hard disk ea day--our library is largely
> Mac-powered, so they stay on in sleep mode.  Also, Networking told
> us that the Macafee product automatically scans a floppie ea time
> you insert it into drive. 
> 
> Time will tell as to effectiveness of Virus Scan.
> 
  Having dealt with this recently, I found that McAfee's Virus Scan, 
Intel's Landesk VProtect, and Trend Micro Devices' PC-cillin all find 
the macro viruses, but there are some they can't clean. The only 
solution is to delete the file(s) in question.
   Here's another caveat. I found to my amazement that even 
experienced computer users don't always understand how a virus, in 
particular a Word macro virus, reproduces itself. I found a macro 
virus on a person's computer 3 times in a row. Each time I 
cleaned/deleted the files and asked if there she were using any 
floppies, which I also scanned and cleaned. When this scenario kept 
repeating itself, I questioned her closely and discovered she would 
take disks from work to use at home. She didn't 
understand how the disks at home could become infected since she had 
never brought them into work, and only copied files to them from a work disk 
she had brought home! Well, after cleaning all her home disks and 
educating her about viruses, we finally put a stop to the infections. 
   I also found the macro virus would hide in the normal.dot template 
file in the msoffice\word\template directory which is in a different 
location than the document (.doc) files. You can clean all the .doc 
files you want, but if the normal.dot file is infected, it will 
reinfect any Word file you open because normal.dot is where all your 
formatting options are located.
   Just a word of advice.

Jay Ward
Automated Systems Manager
Cook Memorial Public Library District
Libertyville, IL  USA
http://www.cooklib.org