[WEB4LIB] two questions on viruses

[Kevin Devine]

To answer your first question, the answer is that the computer is 99% 
safe.  Do the machines have disk drives, CD-roms or USB support 
enabled.  If so, a patron could bring in a virus potentially from those 
sources.

In answering your second question, executables are not like books, 
putting two together is not a sum of the parts.  Think of it more as 
mixing cake mix and ground beef together and then cooking it.  The end 
result is not a hamburger and a cake...

Hope this helps,
Kevin Devine
Euclid Public Library
www.euclidlibrary.org (yes, I know the homepage has an issue in Firefox...)

John Fitzgibbon wrote:

>Hi,
>
>Some of our PCs make the library catalogue available (a web site) and
>only the library catalogue available to the public. It is not possible
>to access any other web site or run any Office program on these PCs. Can
>these PCs become infected by a virus or worm? There is no anti-virus
>software running on them.
>
>Secondly, I read that a virus attaches itself either to the beginning or
>end of a program and launches itself when that program is run. As an
>experiment, I took two programs, Notepad.exe and NoteTab.exe: I copied
>them into one file using a DOS command. The result is a much smaller
>file than the sum of its parts which does not launch the two programs in
>quick succession, as I expected. Any ideas on why this might be so?
>
>Regards
>John
>
>John Fitzgibbon
>
>Galway Public Library
>Island House
>Cathedral Square
>Galway
>Ireland
>
>p: 00 353 91 562471
>f: 00 353 91 565039
>w: http://www.galwaylibrary.ie 
>
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