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from International Herald Tribune on Monday, January 06, 2003

Winevar was insulting, Chernobyl produced evil offspring and FriendGreetings came with a license to kill. The three are names of computer viruses that made the rounds in 2002, another banner year for digital troublemakers. Though there was no single big-name destroyer like the Anna Kournikova virus of 2001 or the Iloveyou from 2000, there were plenty of little guys last year, like one called Bugbear, or variations of the Klez worm.

A virus, at its simplest, is a human-made program or piece of code that is loaded onto your computer without your knowledge and runs against your wishes, according to the Internet-based dictionary Webopedia.

The technically literate make a distinction between viruses and worms. A wormcan replicate itself and use memory, but cannot attach itself to other programs. Unlike a worm, a virus cannot infect other computers without assistance, according to the Free On-Line Dictionary of Computing.

Some viruses wreak their havoc as soon as their code is executed; others lie dormant until their code is executed by the computer, according to SearchSecurity.com. Some viruses are playful in effect and others are quite harmful. Winevar, which circulated in November was both: It generated a message that said "What a foolish thing you have done!" before proceeding to stop anti-virus programs and delete every file on the computer.

Chernobyl, first detected in 1998, was a system virus that was activated on April 26, the anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Its 2002 descendant activated itself on the second day of every month.

FriendGreetings was among the most insidious, combining both spam and a virus: It arrived as e-mail purporting to have an Internet link to an electronic greeting card. But the link instead activated a software download, and the software launched with a license agreement that - believe it or not - legally allowed the virus to propagate to the user's e-mail address book. Anti-virus specialists did some head-scratching over whether this could truly be defined as a virus. But it certainly was contagious.

This year is already off to a viral start: A variant of the Yaha virus had infected tens of thousands of computers globally by the middle of last week.

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