What is Computer Virus?
Before we can comprehend how a computer virus works, it is important to realise what a virus does when it attacks the human body. Viruses are microorganisms that can only multiply within another living cell. Poor health occurs as a result of a viral infection and body cells are destroyed or damaged as a result.
The word virus comes from Latin and literally means ‘poison’ and that is basically what it is - a ‘poison’, able to reproduce itself within another cell or body and an example of an illness caused by a virus is the flu. There are many similarities between human viruses and computer viruses. The computer virus can be anywhere on your pc, usually hidden within a program, file or document.
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. The computer virus has the ability to spread and ‘contaminate’ other computers, files or documents, similar to a common virus like the flu (which spreads from person to person). Files and documents can have a computer virus spread through them such as word-processing documents, spreadsheets, emails, computer programs etc. It can spread itself through removable storage devices such as memory sticks and floppy disks, it can spread itself through the Internet and through local computer networks. It can be unintentionally spread to other computer users because it is well-concealed and hard to identify.
What does a computer virus do precisely? In fact, a ‘digital virus’ will make your computer ill, some can be very harmful, while others are created to simply annoy and just what each type will do to your computer depends on what it has been programmed to do. A wide variety of names have been made up, in order to describe different types of computer viruses, some examples are as follows : The first step to learning what to do about viruses is understanding the basics of what they are and how to be entirely control the safety of your computer.