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What is a Computer Virus?
by Eric Ganir
Category : Computer and Internet |
Computer virus is an executable program written with the intention of causing a wreck to your computer or network, and because viruses are programs, they are loaded into computer memory, executed and instruct the computer to perform the actions dictated by the virus. Virus is the worst of malwares that causes serious havoc to your computer system. A virus is self-replicating and affects computer hardware, software, and even the Operating System. Computer viruses can be contracted through opening e-mail attachments containing viruses, downloading infected programs from the internet (usually free programs), or from removable storage devices such as floppies, USB drives, etc.
Today there are many different names that are used to describe a computer virus. The names that are used to describe these various viruses include Macro Viruses, Email Viruses and Trojan Horses. Of course, each of these different viruses has a slightly different description but they all act in very similar ways. Each of these viruses is able to spread through your computer, internet, local computer networks, and removable storage devices and infect its files and documents. There are millions of worms, Trojan Horses and viruses that your PC has to defend itself against, on a daily basis. Not all viruses have had their claim to fame, most are killed before they can even cause any damage, but a few have been able to sneak through the cracks. The Love Letter virus was possibly the fastest virus known to date. It simply attacked Outlook, and using the user’s mailing list, e-mailed itself to the recipients as a message, with an attachment holding the virus. The Love Letter caused $5.5 billion worth of damage.
Some common symptoms of a computer who's been compromised by malicious programs are system operations slows down greatly, hard disk seems to be full even after files have been deleted, computer will not boot and files are corrupted, systems crashes and many more.
Viruses are classified on the basic of their mode of existence and there are three categories of viruses. There are boot infector, system infector, and general executable program infector. Boot infector is characterized by the fact that they are physically resided in the boot sector [0] sector of the disk. A system infected by such a virus will have the virus residing in a particular area of the disk rather then in a program file. The second category of virus deals with components of the system itself. All machines without execution require an operating system in order to create an environment in which the operator works. System infectors attach themselves to a file such as COMMAND or other memory resident files and manipulate these files. The third category is most dangerous and devastating of the three classes of viruses. They attach themselves to program files and can spread to almost any executable program in any system. As a result, whenever the program is executed, the virus gets loaded and executedfirst and then allows the original program to process. It remains memory resident and infects each and every program that is loaded for execution.
There are various ways to recover the data from most viruses. Experts use a combination of systems to recover data. It is best to rely on data recovery specialists than attempt to do it yourself. Protect yourself by backing up your computer regularly so that in case there is an infection you can restore your system from the back up. It is also important you have very reliable anti-virus software on your machine.
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