Computer Viruses

A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. A virus today could spread much more rapidly than in early computer age due to the Internet.  In the old days for a virus to spread from one computer to another usually was though the use of removable medium such as a floppy disk, CD, DVD, or USB drive.

A virus has to use an infection strategy in order to replicate itself.  The most common replication strategy is for it to attach itself to executable programs.  In the windows environment it would attach itself to an executable program and then it will call itself through the use of an executable key in the Widows Registry.

Viruses have gotten so advanced in our computer era that they could replicate through the internet in the form of advertisement or attaching them self to a video file such as an .avi format video file.

Most virus try to go undetected by being so small that they might not change the size of the infected file and for that reason making it very difficult to be detected.  Others try to kill the task of the antivirus program so that the antivirus can’t find them.

There are many different types of recovery options once you have a virus.  These options depend on the virus you’ve acquired.  Some virus could be removed by running the antivirus software you have and following the prompts for removal, others will require some manual interaction, and others might be so deep in your operating system and have damaged so many files that the only form of recovery is to re-install the operating system.

It is a must for every computer to have Antivirus software installed, and making sure that the definition files are updated on a daily basis to protect itself and your information from being infected with a virus.