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What a Virus Causes On a Computer Network

One day, while I was working in a geology computer lab with some students in Brigham Young University, a computer administrator of geology department came in and said, “Geology server was down. BYU computer network has been severely affected by viruses and worms. Save your works as soon as possible and log out the system, hopefully none of them lost or got damage. I will let you know if I am able to fix and make the server available to you.”

All of us did this instruction with haste. A friend of mine tried to save his ten pages work in H-drive, a hard disk in the network for students. It seemed that there was no problem. Later on after the server was online, he looked up his work in order to print and to turn it in, it was only two pages remained. He sought after the file on the hard drive and found nothing unless his two pages. Suddenly he shouted,”O, man! A damned computer virus ate my work!” He got up and left the lab mad.

Knowing what was happened, all students that were in the lab at that time including me checked our H-drive and found some of our files were gone. Among them are geological illustrations which took us one or two weeks to finish it. I was lucky because I never rely only on H-drive. Instead I always make a back up all of my files on disks.

In daily life the term of “computer virus” and “worm” are very popular, especially in a campus life such as BYU’s. Just like a human virus that is weaken human body system and even causing death, a computer virus makes any computers that are infected by it have a lower performance or fail to work. A virus is a manmade program or piece of code that causes an unexpected, usually negative, event. Viruses are often disguised games or images with clever marketing titles such as "Me, nude."

Whatever terms people use to describe an unexpected program that intrude and disturb a computer network, it is important to know what effects it caused, what actions to prevent it from happen, and what to do if it happened. These following paragraphs are explaining about what a virus causes.

A virus slows an internet connection. Why? Because it takes a computer memory that we suppose use it to process our data, and then it use the memory to replicate itself and infected every file, especially executable files on an installed hard disk. During the infection, to retrieve information from World Wide Web takes an unusual long time. Students, who want to get information from the Internet for their paper or reading emails from relatives, become frustrated. Teachers who want to put assignments for students or retrieve student grade from a database must spent three to four times longer than usual. By this disturbing, live discussion on an internet between a teacher and students isn’t interesting anymore. Education processes are detained.

If the virus that affects a computer network were not removed as soon as possible, it may cause a severe impact. It’s worse than what I previously mentioned. It makes the server down. Server is a computer on a network that is dedicated to a particular purpose and which stores all information and performs the critical functions for that purpose.

If the server down, BYU community cannot get into the Route Y, a place on the network to access personal information, email account, financial information, meal plan and other services provided by the university. They cannot log on to the network and they cannot use any computers during this time. As result, online classes are stopped, and no computer activities. Some parts of university activities are paralyzed.

The worse case is when a violent virus destroys files on many computers. Sometimes it just deletes or infects several files, but erasing all files in a computer storage device happens often times. The virus doesn’t care of what it destroyed either thousands dollars computer programs, invaluable databases, or student’s papers. In this case, people realize how important spending some money for backing up data into an external storage device and for tightening a computer network security by installing the latest version of an anti-virus. Although it doesn’t mean that there are no more jobs to do if another virus attacks.

Computer administrators are getting busy and getting an additional unexpected overnight job. They try to find which computers among hundreds or thousands of computers were infected by a virus. They do it by scanning those computers with an anti-virus program such as Norton or McAfee anti-virus. Any viruses they found have to be removed. If any data is lost, they will try to recover it and if any computer programs become malfunction, they will install the new ones. This is not an easy and a fun job; instead this is a rush and a brain-taking job. Tightening security by installing the newest anti-virus program, they have to buy is a must to protect from other viruses in the future.

Although a virus only destroys software, not hardware, it is able to make accountants getting crazy. These people have to recalculate a budget that they made in the beginning of the year for information technology department. They have to pay for employers additional work hours in order to maintain a computer network run properly and to recover any lost data. 

            Whatever affects a virus caused – loosing time, money and invaluable ideas – a virus always create terror to both computer users and computer nerds. [HN]

Copyright © 2003 - Hendro Nugroho