Viruses:

A virus is a piece of software or code designed to piggyback itself to a program in your computer. Every time the program is run, the virus also runs and has a chance to replicate or reproduce itself and then attach to another program in the computer. Usual symptoms are the program being used does not operate normally, and it operates more slowly. Viruses come in many different forms-some do little or no damage but others can be fatal to your computer and everything stored on it.

E-mail viruses:

These viruses migrate by means of e-mail messages &/or attachments. They spread by e-mailing themselves to every address found in the address book in the computer. Given the sheer volume of e-mail traffic on a global basis, this allows these viruses to spread very rapidly, and the volume created has forced email server shutdowns on a number of occasions.

The latest thing in the world of computer viruses is the e-mail virus, and the Melissa virus in March 1999 was very destructive. Melissa spread in Microsoft Word documents sent via e-mail, and it worked like this:

Someone created the virus as a Word document uploaded to an Internet newsgroup. Anyone who downloaded the document and opened it would trigger the virus. The virus would then send the document (and therefore itself) in an e-mail message to the first 50 people in the person's address book. The e-mail message contained a friendly note that included the person's name, so the recipient would open the document thinking it was harmless. The virus would then create 50 new messages from the recipient's machine. As a result, the Melissa virus was the fastest-spreading virus ever seen! As mentioned earlier, it forced a number of large companies to shut down their e-mail systems.

Boot Sector Viruses:

As virus creators got more sophisticated, they learned new tricks. One important trick was the ability to load viruses into memory so they could keep running in the background as long as the computer remained on. This gave viruses a much more effective way to replicate themselves. Another trick was the ability to infect the boot sector on floppy disks and hard disks. The boot sector is a small program that is the first part of the operating system that the computer loads. The boot sector contains a tiny program that tells the computer how to load the rest of the operating system. By putting its code in the boot sector, a virus can guarantee it gets executed. It can load itself into memory immediately, and it is able to run whenever the computer is on. Boot sector viruses can infect the boot sector of any floppy disk inserted in the machine, and on college campuses where lots of people share machines they spread like wildfire.

For more information or to schedule a virus removal and protection visit, please contact us.