Article

Viruses can make kiosks unhealthy

Viruses damage business as well as personal computers. Certain types of kiosks are vulnerable, too.

March 20, 2002

Mike Walton, Web editor for IT publisher TechRepublic, remembered the day his company got hit with "ILOVEYOU," a particularly malicious e-mail virus that affected companies last year.

"Someone came running down the hallways shouting, `Don't open attachments! Don't open attachments!' " he recalled. "Of course someone did."

The virus spread throughout the TechRepublic e-mail server like wildfire.

"We all got to go home while they cleaned it up," he said.

Cases like this are becoming all too familiar at businesses and on home computers. Viruses, with silly names such as ILOVEYOU, Melissa or this year's Sir Cam, are anything but silly. According to a report last year from Wired online, Melissa affected more than one million computers, while CNET reported last year that ILOVEYOU brought down computers in Hong Kong and Denmark.

With such devastating potential, it's fair to wonder if public access Internet kiosks that let users browse e-mail are vulnerable to these viruses.

Don't get attached

"Sure they are," said David Campbell, vice president of professional services for London, Ontario kiosk software maker Visible Advantage Corp. "If somebody opens up an attachment, obviously, that's where 99 percent of the viruses are coming into e-mail."

The way to protect these types of kiosks is to make sure that attachments can't get through.

"I think that's the easiest way of dealing with it," Campbell said. "There are other ways of dealing with it, to put virus checking software on the device itself."

But anti-virus software may not work as well on kiosks as it does on personal computers.

"It's meant to deal with a manned style of approach. So the easiest way to catch it in the kiosk mode is to prevent it from happening in the first place," he said.

Worming their way in

These viruses, more accurately called "worms" because they worm their way into computers and do damage, are activated when users open an e-mail containing an attachment. The attachment, which may resemble a harmless file, such as a Microsoft Word document or Excel spreadsheet, contains the harmful code.

The code, called a payload, can use information in Microsoft's Outlook e-mail program to send copies of itself to members of the victim's contact list. Further, worms can infect the computer itself and activate on a certain date to do damage, such as erasing all the files on a hard drive.

Building in safety

No less important than a business environment, a kiosk must operate 24/7. Therefore, operators of public access Internet terminals work especially hard to protect the machines.

Hamed Shahbazi, president of Vancouver, British Columbia-based Info Touch Technologies Corp., a maker of public access Internet terminals, said, "Our kiosks are 100 percent immune from viruses because we never give them (viruses) the opportunity to leave the server and come to the kiosk."

The strategy is to forbid attachments.

"Our e-mail program will never enable you to click on an attachment," he said.

Customers of these kiosks, however, don't always use the machine's own e-mail program. In many cases, they will check e-mail through their Web accounts, such as those provided by Hotmail or Yahoo.

"The way that we deal with Hotmail and those types of programs is that it (the kiosk) basically takes away their ability to take it off their server," Shahbazi said.

In addition, the kiosks disable the ability to launch applications or use the "save as" menu choice.

"That entire screen is killed as soon as it is generated by our program," he said.

Future worries

As if e-mail viruses weren't concern enough, the future may give evil geniuses more opportunities to wreak havoc.

Dan Staivnicky, chief technology officer for Mississauga, Ontario kiosk software designer TouchPoint Technologies Corp., said, "As we enter this digital age with kiosks using infrared or Bluetooth communication to communicate with a PDA (personal digital assistant) or a notebook with people putting memory sticks or smart cards in the kiosks, we're going to have to step up what can and can't be read and written to the kiosk also."

The problem is that these devices might allow users to write information to the kiosk, or present a virus infecting a kiosk with new ways to spread to other machines.

"Normally your ATM or kiosk has no ability to write to a normal magnetic strip card," Staivnicky said, "But a smart card is meant to be read and written to. So as soon as you introduce that, you are going to whet the appetite of vandals."

Though viruses are the big news right now, other, more embarrassing problems can occur at kiosks that allow e-mail attachments to be opened.

"You never know what somebody is going to send you in the way of an image. The person behind you may be looking at something that isn't terribly appropriate to be showing in kiosks," Visible Advantage's Campbell said. "It's a display virus, if you will."

[Editor's note: Info Touch Technologies became Tio Networks in April 2006.]