Symptoms

Symptoms of Infection

There are several virus symptoms that an expert can spot, but there are a few that can be noticed by the novice user. One or more of these symptoms indicate a possible infection, but the majority of them can be caused by other problems too. The symptoms are color coded by severity. In gauging if you are infected, recognize the severity of the symptom, and how many symptoms apply to you.

The Database Links lead to four sites that have continually updated virus databases that contain descriptions of most known viruses. The sites also contain specific symptoms and removal tips.

Red - Infection is very probable
Brown - Infection is likely, but symptom could occur from other malfunctions
Green - Infection is possible, but these can occur in regular machine operation

	Computer seeks floppy drive regularly, without a disk in the drive.
	The message "MBR has been changed or modified" appears at boot up.
	Computer runs much slower than before, more "blue screens" and "lock ups."
	You are prompted with "insufficient memory" errors which you did not receive before.
	You have ever seen fireworks and a message that read "Happy New Year 1999!"
	Computer reads from your hard drive much more often than before.
	Scandisk restarts several times stating that "something is writing to the disk."
	Disk Defragmenter restarts several times during a defrag.
	You receive emails from companies telling you that you sent them a virus, but you insist that you did not send an attachment with your email.
	In "Performance" under system in Control Panel, your hard drive is using compatibility mode file system or file paging.
	Your computer displays odd messages, uses vulgar language, melts, or other amazingly obvious activity.
	Your computer dials the internet for no apparent reason.
	Your computer dials the internet at startup.
	You have seen ANY of the screens in the SCREEN SHOTS section (see Navigation Bar).
	Your anti-virus software reports that your computer has a virus.

MORE....

Most viruses that cause serious damage can be detected long before the damage is done. It is a matter of recognizing various symptoms. The majority off all viruses have no payload at all meaning that they do not have an attack phase. As these tend to be the viruses you are most likely to encounter, you should be aware that there are usually symptoms of virus infection before any (or much!) damage is done.

There are various kinds of symptoms that some virus authors have written into their programs, such as messages, music, and graphical displays. The main indications, however, are changes in system resources. Programs reporting they do not have enough memory to run or are out of RAM are important indicators. Also unusual floppy disk activity (without a diskette in the drive) can be an indicator. If you are using Windows on your PC and you suddenly start getting messages at Windows startup that 32-bit Disk Access cannot be used, or the Boot Record has been modified, this often indicated your PC has been infected by a boot-sector virus. These symptoms, along with longer disk activity and strange behavior from the hardware, may instead be caused by flaws in genuine software, by harmless "joke" programs, or by hardware faults. Virus detection software messages are one of the best practical indicators of a virus. The only foolproof way to determine that a virus is present is for an expert to analyze the code of every program, but this is impractical.