Frequently Asked Questions about F/WIN ====================================== I ALREADY HAVE A VIRUS SCANNER. WHY USE F/WIN? a. F/WIN uses heuristic detection for macro viruses that infect Microsoft Word documents. That means it can find known and UNKNOWN macro viruses and trojans, as well as deliberate acts of sabotage in Word macros. b. F/WIN can remove known and unknown macro viruses. A lot of the regular antivirus programs can only detect macro viruses and of course they only can remove KNOWN viruses. F/WIN is able to clean an infected document which had macros installed before infection. Only the virus macros will be removed in this case. c. F/WIN offers a complex heuristic which has a very high detection ratio but also has very little false positives on harmless files. The heuristic detection allows F/WIN to produce a detailed virus analysis. d. F/WIN offers full OLE 2.0 support and is able to correctly handle very large and complex Word documents without problems. F/WIN does not use the defective OLE2.DLL or OLE32.DLL for accessing Word documents. F/WIN will also handle Macintosh and Asian Word documents. e. F/WIN is a passive scanner. That means you don't have to use Word templates to defend yourself against macro viruses. These templates are no real safe protection, and of course, you will need Winword for using them. F/WIN is a DOS based virus scanner and doesn't stay resident in memory. f. F/WIN can detect and remove the only known PE-EXE (Windows 95 viruses). g. F/WIN can detect known and unknown viruses that infect Windows EXE files which use the or infection scheme like . h. F/WIN is inexpensive, especially when considering the protection that it provides. SHOULD I REPLACE MY EXISTING SCANNER WITH F/WIN? No. F/WIN is a specialized scanner that is intended to supplement the one you currently have. By now, there are more than 10000 known viruses for DOS, but only about 250 Windows specific Macro and EXE viruses. You will need a normal DOS antivirus program, of course. However, it's likely that the number of Windows viruses will increase in the future. Macro viruses like or are already considered as being more common than boot viruses like , or . DOES F/WIN DETECT MACRO VIRUSES IN OTHER SOFTWARE LIKE AMIPRO, WORD PERFECT, ETC.? At this time it does not. That is a feature we hope to add to it at a future date. So far, F/WIN only detects macro viruses in Microsoft Word 6.0 and 7.0 documents. The known non-Winword macro viruses like AmiPro.Green_Stripe, Excel.Laroux or Excel.Sofa aren't reported to be common. HOW OFTEN WILL F/WIN BE UPDATED? Because of it's heuristic nature, F/WIN doesn't need regular updates like normal virus scanners. Normally, updates will be released to provide bug fixes or add new features, and will appear at least every two months. Of course customers will be provided with a new version if they detect a virus which F/WIN missed. HOW WILL I RECEIVE UPDATES? Because the FWIN.KEY is valid for every new version, you just need to download the shareware version from your local BBS or FTP/WWW site and replace the FWIN.EXE file! The latest shareware version of F/WIN is available at: http://www.fwin.com (Homepage) http://www.psnw.com/~joe http://www.cyberbox.north.de (German site) The program is released as a ZIP archive and will have a file name like FWIN402E.ZIP (English version) and FWIN402G.ZIP (German version). HOW SAFE IS F/WIN? CAN IT DESTROY MY DOCUMENTS? The cleaning process has proven to be safe in our tests. But if for some reason it would damage your document, it makes a backup of it before attempting to remove the virus. The backup allows you to try a different method for cleaning or to recover the file if the cleaning process failed. F/WIN will not modify a file when it fails to create a backup of the infected file before. HOW QUICKLY WILL I GET A REPLY TO QUESTIONS? As we both aren't full-time virus researchers, we can't always respond at once. We will check our accounts at least one time a day, so you will get answers within one or two days. We will do our best to get to you as quickly as possible. If you are e-mailing us about a current virus emergency, please put "VIRUS EMERGENCY" in the SUBJECT line of your e-mail message. Those messages will be given first priority. WHY SHOULD I CHOOSE F/WIN OVER OTHER AV PRODUCTS TO PROTECT AGAINST WORD MACRO VIRUSES? F/WIN was designed from the beginning by its author (Stefan Kurtzhals) to be able to detect and remove known and unknown viruses and trojans, while at the same time allowing Word users to go on using WordBasic macros they wanted to use. While most Word users don't use WordBasic macros, many do. And those that do, often find these macros to be real time-savers because they automate repetitive, tedious processes that would normally have to be done manually. F/WIN Anti-virus has built into it profiles of how viruses and trojans "behave". If it finds macros that fit the pattern, it warns the user so that they can choose whether or not to remove the macros. These build-in behavior profiles offer several advantages to F/WIN users: 1. Users can go on using most, if not all of the macros they currently use without having to deal with endless false alarms. If a product produces too many false alarms, users will simply quit using it and leave themselves with little or no defenses. The heuristic detection of F/WIN is very well balanced and has only very little false positives. 2. F/WIN distinguishes between a trojan and a virus. This can be important for a user to know for damage assessment purposes, because viruses spread themselves to other files. Trojans don't. 3. F/WIN doesn't just say it's found potentially dangerous macros like some products do. It goes a step further and tells the user exactly what suspicious behavior it has found. The user gets a detailed report about the possible damages the virus might cause. 4. F/WIN uses an optimized OLE 2.0 file access and does properly handle the complex Word Document format. It does not need to rely on the defective OLE2.DLL and OLE32.DLL. F/WIN IS A DOS PROGRAM. WILL IT HANDLE THE LONG FILE NAMES WINDOWS 95 USES? Yes it will. We have tested F/WIN in the following environments: PC DOS (5.0+) MS DOS (5.0+) Windows 3.x Windows 95 (DOS 7.0) Windows NT 3.51 Windows NT 4.00 OS/2 Warp 3.0, 4.0 (from a DOS window) There is an advantage to using a DOS version in Windows 95 and Windows 3.x. If a virus or trojan deletes or damages critical files that Windows 3.x or Windows 95 uses, you can't get into those environments to run your virus scanner. In the case of either Widows 3.x or Windows 95, you could boot from a floppy (or not), and still be able to run F/WIN to find the culprit. Most anti-virus programs offer a DOS versions for situation like this, but there are some that don't. Remember, if a virus manages to infect your system, Windows will most likely not start up and you can't use your Windows based antivirus program. It is strongly recommended to boot from a DOS boot disk before trying to remove a virus.