Viruses Revealed

Hardly a week goes by without news of some malicious program or other playing hob with large numbers of computers somewhere on the Internet. Viruses Revealed shows where computer viruses come from, how they spread, and how you can protect the computers you're responsible for. It recognizes that viruses are inherent in the modern computing environment (which makes it easy to share data among machines) and that there's no absolutely certain way to maintain any degree of usefulness in a computer while eliminating all risk of viral infection. From there, the three authors proceed to make their readers informed participants in a dangerous computing world. They do this by defining terms (like dropper, a program that isn't a virus itself but which serves to install one), explaining concepts (like the difficulties antivirus programs face in detecting Trojan programs), and documenting historical events (infamous viruses of the past--Love Bug, Kournikova, and so on--and why they worked).

To their great credit, the authors go to great lengths to be authoritative. They document pretty much everything they say with references and rarely assume that the reader knows what any but the most basic terms mean. Furthermore, they're modest and don't claim that what they say will save your machines from viral attack. Rather, they say that appropriate defenses will reduce your risk of infection, and solid documentation, backup, and recovery mechanisms will help you halt successful attacks early and recover from them promptly. The prose here is well written and often funny--Viruses Revealed is a big winner. --David Wall

Topics covered: Computer viruses--what they are, where they come from, how they work, and how to deal with them. A combination of case studies and explanatory prose shows how to minimize your virus risk, regardless of what kinds of computers you run.