THE IMPACT OF COMPUTER VIRUS ATTACKS AND IT'S PREVENTIVE MECHANISMS AMONG PERSONAL COMPUTER (PC) USERS

By

Author

Presented To

Department of Computer Science

Attacks
Boot Sector Virus: These types of viruses effect on the
disk and the hard drive that holds small section
referred as the sectors. Once the boot sector is attacked
they become infected when you reboot the system with
the infected diskette it spreads through the hard drive.
Multipartite viruses: It is a form of hybrid boot sector
program virus that affects the programming files.
While the infected program is activated it hits the boot
record. When the system is restarted it subsequently
passes on the infection to other local drive in to
computer scattering on the virus to the other
programming files instantly.
Macro viruses: infects a Microsoft Word or similar
application and causes a sequence of actions to be
A. Ilmudeen(1)
The Impact of Computer Virus Attacks and
Its Preventive Mechanisms among
Personal Computer (PC) Users
(1) MIS Unit, Department of Accountancy & Finance, Faculty of Management and Commerce,
South Eastern University of Sri Lanka, Oluvil, Sri Lanka.(email:
[email protected])
Proceedings of the Third International Symposium,
SEUSL: 6-7 July 2013, Oluvil, Sri Lanka

performed automatically when the application is
started or something else triggers it. A typical effect is
the undesired insertion of some comic text at certain
points when writing a line.
Stealth viruses: Have the characteristic of hiding and
usually changes file sizes to escape detection. A virus
with stealth attributes tends to be found in a boot
sector or a program file. Stealth viruses cover their
trails by two techniques. The first is to redirect disk
reads to other locations and the second technique is
making a change in boot tables.
Program Virus: The program virus is kept hidden in
the files or documents, once they are activated or
called they start infecting the system by copying the
virus to other files and replicating to the system.
Polymorphic Virus: The Polymorphic virus behaves
like a chameleon that changes its virus signature
frequently once they get multiplied and ready to affect
the next new-fangled file. It is also referred to as binary
pattern.
FAT virus : It is a computer virus which attacks the file
allocation table (FAT), a system used in Microsoft
products and some other types of computer systems to
access the information stored on a computer.
Literature Review
A virus is by definition a computer program that
spreads or replicates by copying itself (F-Secure
Corporation 2001). Computer virus attacks have
become serious worldwide issue and can quickly
spread through the Internet, causing even more
damages (Joseph Wen 1998). Unlike other threats
computer viruses able to infect from program to
program, file to file and computer to computer very
rapidly without direct human intervention. (Joseph
Wen 1998) mentioned in his research that a computer
virus can cause the loss or alteration of programs or
data, and can compromise their confidentiality. (Joseph
Wen 1998) stated that the vital part of a virus is a set
of instructions that when executed spreads itself to
other unaffected programs or files. Based on the
intention of the virus developer these instructions can
do any harmful activities like displaying a message,
erasing files or altering stored data, replicating itself
and taking up system resources such as disk space ,
memory, Central Processing Unit (CPU) time and
network connections. (Joseph Wen 1998). In general
most of the viruses are stay active in memory until we
shut down our computer system. But when we turn off
the computer we just temporarily remove the virus
from memory, but not permanently remove from the
file or disk it has infected. The next time when we use
the computer system the virus program is activated
and starts its vandal activities continuously. Typically
there are many well-known techniques can be used by
viruses to destruct the computer system. Basically a
typical virus make two functions thus first it copies
itself into uninfected programs or files, second it
executes other malicious instructions the virus
developer included in it. (Babak Bashari Rad et al,
2011) mentioned in their research that, there is a great
fight between virus developer and anti-virus experts
and it is becoming more difficult issue in day by day
and in future too. (Essam Al Daoud et al, 2008)
mentioned that anti-virus softwares are advancing
their methods and techniques to detect viruses, on the
other hand the virus developers are looking for new
tactics to break them. Specially computer virus
developers apply many strategies to escape from the
detection such as space filling, compressing and
encryption. On the other hand the antivirus softwares
are trying to detect the viruses by using alternative
static and dynamic methods. In general PC users today
need to have a fully-fledged virus protection
mechanisms to face the growing threat of virus attacks.
Some of the Warnings of Virus Infected
Computer
The virus infected computer shows the followings
symptoms such as computer performance slowed
down and it takes a long time to start, it gets restarted
frequently on itself, it displays more prompt messages
with unusual errors and collapse of operations and
strange sounds or music plays from speakers
unexpectedly, failure in application functionality to
meet up to the mark, crushed data that are change in
format and difficult to reopen, files and documents do
not get opened at times with error or unknown file
formats, email account automatically send messages
with the virus to our contacts, the command
CTRL+ALT+DEL no longer works, antivirus no longer
update, receives an e-mail message that has a strange
attachment, an anti-virus program is disabled for no
reason and it cannot be restarted, the computer may
not allow re-installation of the anti-virus, new icons
that you did not place on the desktop appears, a
program disappears from the computer without
uninstallation, operating system does not start because
certain critical system files are missing, receive error
messages listing those files, programs that used to run
now stop responding frequently, and a partition
completely disappears….etc
Statement of the Problem & Research
Question
Researcher conducted an preliminary interview
among the Personal Computer (PC) users with regard
to their computer usage and its interruption. People are
using computers for several purposes like internet
surfing, social media, e-commerce, e-learning,
preparing documents, entertainment…etc. It is notable
that most of the personal computer users are using
internet based activities and it has high possibility to
virus infection from the internet. Researcher’s
interview revealed that computer virus attacks are
occur in numerous ways due to the user’s lack of
knowledge about virus infection, unprotected system,
antivirus not installed …etc. Research question is raised
as "what are the reasons for computer virus attacks and
what possible preventive mechanisms to safeguard the
personal computer user’s system.
Objectives of the Research
As people increasingly use Internet technology as
a way to connect with globe the possibility of acquiring
computer virus is greater. Computer viruses have
become an ongoing worldwide problem and can travel
quickly through the Internet and causing even more
destruction. Individuals today need to have a
comprehensive virus protection policy to face the
growing threat of these old and new viruses. Objectives
of this research are:
• Identify the reasons which cause virus attacks
among the personal computer users.
• Suggest the possible preventive mechanism to
safeguard their computer resources from virus
attacks.
Methodology
Data Collection
The researcher used questionnaire as a research
tool to collect data. 110 questionnaires were issued
among university undergraduates, professionals and
PC users to collect the data. Among the respondent
only 100 respondent’s data were considered for the
analysis purpose. This sample has been taken from
University, professionals and PC users on the basis of
convenient sampling method. Researcher had the
access for collecting data easily from these categories.
The questionnaire composed by the researcher by
focusing many aspect of computer virus like reasons
for virus attack, virus infection damages in PC,
possible symptoms in an infected PC, type of antivirus
production, preventive mechanism for virus
infection….etc.
Data presentation and analysis
The collected data were entered to the SPSS 16.0
and researcher conducted the relevant descriptive
analysis. This was made using SPSS.
Results and Discussion
Majority of the respondents replied that viruses
have high impact on personal computer usage. From
the collected data 68 respondents revealed that their
PC infected by virus attack more than 6 times within
last three months. From this research the respondents
reveal the reasons for PC’s virus infections are with
respect to using pen drives(43%), not having
antivirus(29%), visiting harmful sites(12%), free from
antivirus updates(11%), does not have licence version
of software(5%) and too much of internet surfing(9%).
Program file infection has been recognized as a
serious issue by the PC users and it affected the PC
severely. Further hard disk infection, system file
infection and boot sector infections also highlighted by
the respondents. All respondents indicated that
Internet browsing has virus attack and majority of
them using the trial version (70%) of antivirus software
as a protection mechanism. Among the licence version
of antivirus users approximately AVG and KasperskY