Although Macintoshes are equally susceptible to computer viruses, the freeware product Disinfectant 3.6 has kept Macintosh virus problems to a minimum on campus. Therefore this article only makes passing references to Macintoshes concerning virus protection. In the last year DOS computers at TCU have seen a real epidemic of viruses. Viruses are spread by running infected programs or by booting from an infected floppy disk.
Most viruses simply propagate themselves causing minor inconveniences to the user.
Some viruses, however, can damage important data files-sometimes completely erasing hard drives. Without virus protection you can never really be sure that your computer has not been infected. In the last year we have found viruses in a variety of academic departments, some critical administrative departments, and on many disks brought in by students. Many departments have student workers who have unintentionally infected the office computers. Most of these viruses were fairly benign, but a couple were particularly nasty, deleting and corrupting many important files.