BEGPANI.CVP  931005
 
                           DON'T PANIC!
 
If this was the Hitchiker's Guide to Viral Programs, that would be
in large, friendly red letters.  Most books dealing with what to do
about an infection tell you not to panic.  Unfortunately, most of
them seem to assume that you are reading at leisure, in advance, in
time to prepare for the disaster to come.  They don't tell you much
of what to do when you actually *are* in trouble, unprepared, and
have bought the book in a panic to find out what to do.
 
The following section is going to be a sort of question and answer
template for what to do if caught unprepared.  This is far from
perfect.  Ideally, this should be a sort of hypertext situation
where you could follow a flowchart and get help at any point.  Given
this is text, the help will have to be included all the way along. 
As soon as you get the idea of one item, you can skip any remaining
text and skip to the bottom of the item to find out where to go
next.
 
Again ideally, there should be a clear "if yes, go to 5.3; if no, go
to 5.4" type of progression through the questions.  Because it is
impossible to foresee all of the many situations you might be in,
the path may get a bit fuzzy at times.  For starters, I don't even
know what computer you have, or what operating system you are using. 
Therefore, this guide will have to be very generic.  At many points
the direction is going to have to be, "If you don't understand this,
get some etra help from your friends/user group/support staff".
 
If you are comfortable with getting, and using, utility software
from BBSes, then you will probably be able to follow this guide all
the way through.  I don't mean to imply that you *will* be going and
geting utility software with a modem, but that "comfort level"
indicates the kind of technical level people are at.  You may need
to use utility software at some point:  it makes no difference
whether it is shareware, commercial or came with the operating
system.  However, just because you own a commercial utility package
doesn't mean you always know what it does.  If you have doubts, call
someone you know who is comfortable at that level and have them go
over the guide with you.
 
Please have them go through the guide with you.  There are an awful
lot of people out there who think they know a lot about computers. 
Trouble is, most of them do - but that doesn't guarantee that they
know anything about viral programs.  I once worked with a very
capable technical support person.  He was one of the first in the
city to get a "dual boot" OS/2 and MS-DOS system working.  He
thought he was hot stuff - and, generally, he was.  He thought my
"expertise" in viral programs was interesting but a bit pointless
... until the day he had to ask me to clean his system.  He'd
infected himself while trying to clean up someone else.
 
copyright Robert M. Slade, 1993   BEGPANI.CVP  931005

==============
Vancouver      ROBERTS@decus.ca         | "Is it plugged in?"
Institute for  Robert_Slade@sfu.ca      | "I can't see."
Research into  rslade@cue.bc.ca         | "Why not?"
User           p1@CyberStore.ca         | "The power's off
Security       Canada V7K 2G6           |  here."