What steps should be taken in diagnosing and identifying viruses?
Most of the time, a virus scanner program will take care of that for you. (Remember, though, that scanning programs must be kept up to date. Also remember that different scanner authors may call the same virus by different names. If you want to identify a virus in order to ask for help, it is best to run at least two scanners on it and, when asking, say which scanners, and what versions, gave the names.) To help identify problems early, run it on new programs and diskettes; when an integrity checker reports a mismatch, when a generic monitoring program sounds an alarm; or when you receive an updated version of a scanner (or a different scanner than the one you have been using). However, because of the time required, it is not generally advisable to insert into your AUTOEXEC.BAT file a command to run a scanner on an entire hard disk on every boot. If you run into an alarm that the scanner doesn’t identify, or doesn’t properly clean up for you, first verify that the version that you are
