Rival Designs

First of all, it is important to know what a virus does when it attacks the human body before we can fully comprehend how a computer virus works. A virus is a small organism that is only able to reproduce itself within another living cell or body. Body cells can be damaged as a result of a viral infection and an individual will become ill as consequence.

Able to reproduce itself within another cell or body, the word virus is Latin for ‘poison’ and that is basically what it is – a ‘poison’, an example of an illness caused by a virus is the common cold. Whereas the human virus damages living cells, the computers files and hard disc can be harmed by the computer virus. The computer virus can be concealed in a program, file or document and could be anywhere on your laptop.

Criminals, and other talented idiots with nothing better to do with their time, create these viruses and spread them to other people’s computers. Causing havoc is the main reason for doing this. Similar to a common virus like the flu (which spreads from person to person), the computer virus has the ability to spread and ‘infect’ other computers, files or documents. Files and documents can have a computer virus spread through them such as word-processing documents, spreadsheets, emails, computer programs etc. As well as through removable storage devices such as memory sticks and floppy disks, it can spread itself through the Internet and through local computer networks. Because it is hidden, it is hard to detect and it can be spread to other computers, unknowingly, by the computer user.

Akin to a human virus that makes a person feel unwell, the computer virus works in a similar fashion within a computer. A ‘digital virus’ can be very harmful, while others are created to simply annoy and will literally make your computer ’sick’ but just what each type will do to your computer depends on what it has been programmed to do. Some words used to identify various viruses are Macro Viruses, Email Viruses and Trojan Horses. You will be able to control the security of your computer when you understand the fundamentals about computer viruses.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 at 11:46 am and is filed under Computer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.