Why does anyone do anything? The thing about this virus is it'sCynth wrote:Why would someone invent a virus that would only harm things on a certain day? And how would people know about it before that day? This all seems quite puzzling. It sort of sounds like a "tarantula in the beehive hairdo" story or something.
supposed to erase documents on the 3rd of every month (so they're
hoping someone might restore from a backup on Feb 4th, and think
they're OK, then on March 3rd, it hits again). Today is just the first
month the virus will be active since it was released into the wild...
How do people know about it? Well, it's possible that some poor
Schmuck had his clock set wrong, and the computer thought it was
Feb 3rd when it was actually, say, Jan 16 (I think this is when the virus
was originally found). But more likely is that some smart person got
an email with the virus attached, and thought the attachment might
be a virus, so she sent it to the Anti-Virus expert of her choice. This
entity took the attachment apart (this is called "disassembling") to
see what it did, and found the code that looks for the 3rd of the
month and deleted files. Then they informed the public. There's a
lot of people who are really on top of this stuff, which is good,
because there are a LOT of virus writers...
