North Van man’s virus- spotting shareware a hit Michael Becker News Editor michacl@usnews.com THE world of comput- er viruses is rife with hoaxes, urban legends, myths and empty threats. Yet the few rwisted brains out there wha do manage to write truly destructive com- puter viruses have traditionally expended their misguided energy targeting the more popular PCs rather than Apple Macintoshes. Computer viruses are sub- programs that attach them- selves to other programs. Once launched they cause whatever havoc their makers intend them to. There is an entire industry dedicated to checking for viruses and providing the anti- dotes necessary to neutralize real chreats posed. Last year things got unusu- ally hot on the virus front for Macintosh users, thanks most- ly to the newfound popularity of the Mac platform. Mark Weston, the owner of Mountain Ridge Dataworks in North Vancouver, sells Apple products and support to busi- nesses. Several months ago Weston unexpectedly found himself gaining a lot of business from Mac users who had suffered system damage due to a com- puter virus. Weston said the problem - was compounded by the fact thar last year in August, Virex, one of the most popular anti- virus software cools, was bought our by Network Associates, The company did- nt release a virus update for Used Hard Drive 540 MB - 2.1 GB $85 - $195 =y Nk NORTH Vancouver computer programmer Mark Weston recently develo north shore news USINESS HIGH TECH: is called BugScan and is available for free at . approximately four months. An anti-virus tuol is only as good as its updates. Said Weston, “I guess they wanted to make a whole pile of changes on it and it just took forever.” The upshot was that Mac users with Virex were stuck with an outdated virus definitions file. Weston said the most dam- aging virus to strike Mac users was the AuroStart virus. The Macintosh platform is the standard for the graphics industry. Related businesses and professionals were espe- cially hard hit. Said Weston, “Nobody had any protection — no way to find it. It was basically just frying your system's soft- ware, wiping out files, cating something like a megabyte of data cvery half hour. For a whole month all we did was ere Your Microsoft Office 97 - $199 Windows 98 - $110 Office 97/Windows 98 $249 (wisystem purchase) fix people’s computer sys- tems.” Dwight Dionne, a partner with North Shore Imagesetting in North Vancouver, began seeing the AutoStart virus last summer. He still occasionally comes across it. Said Dionne, “ For a while pretty much anything that came in on Zip (storage) disks was infected. We didn’t have any major nightmares but it cost us a lot of time and effort.” Ever since the AutoStart troubles surfaced, the compa- ny spends an extra half hour of staff time a day checking all system folders. By Weston’s reckoning, the worst month on the North Shore was October. “Everybody got the virus. We'd have to go in, back up all their data, reformat their Money Buys You 72 PIN EDO RAM Best Price Guaranteed! + Network Hardware 50 machines and put brand new system software down,” lie said. Enter BugScan. Weston, who writes soft- ware, saw a need. He took it upon himself to create an anti- virus tool for Mac users. It’s available free of charge and may be downloaded at his company’s Web site . He completed the software tool approximately — two months ago after spending an entire month of long evenings building the thing. Weston is a self-taught pro- grammer and actually enjoys the process. “I’m absolutely fascinated by computer pro- gramming. LE could do it 25 hours a day. ’'m a complete nerd I guess.” BugSean is written in Visual Basic programming language. 15” Compag Monitors Refurbished $149 - $169 75% off + Wednesday, January 27. 1999 ~ Norn Shore News ~ 19 a ——_ On the surface it’s difficule to understand why anyonc would put so much personal energy into something given away freely to people. Said Weston, “I wondered thar after | did it. It’s basically for the recognition and to return some of the favours that [ve had in my computer career. “Freeware and shareware are two ways to get to the top — things you have to do in order to get known, to get to the next level of program- ming. You can’t do it forever. It’s a tremendous amount of development time.” The project entailed writ- ing manv pages of computer code and hours of research. During the month of October he recorded 250,000 hits at his Web site. “I couldn’t believe it. Ninety thousand people downloaded that pro- Pentiums Mainboards from $85 NEWS photo Paul McGrath ped a shareware anti-virus tool for Macintosh users. The software gram that month. That's when the Autostart virus was flying high,” said Weston. He calls Latteware. “It’s the same as freeware or shareware. When you're building it you usually ask for something. “Ic’s a gesture to see how many people out there actually use your program. I ask for Starbucks coupons for lattes,” Weston said. He has received responses from all over the United States, Japan, Singapore and even Croatia. The next time you sec Mark Weston with a Starbucks coffee in hand, you'll know where it came from — a bugged computer user some- where out there on the cyber- frontier. See also “Bugscan” on Page 21. BugScan,