Computer Virus Information
Computer viruses are malicious programs which could damage your files and programs on your PC. Some types are not harmful, but spread, and the heavy load of infected emails on servers may cause a major slowdown on the Internet. Computer viruses also play on exploiting vulnerabilities in software.
A computer virus is merely computer code that affixes itself to a program or file in order to spread from computer to computer. It infects as it spreads. Computer viruses can damage your software, your hardware, and your files.
Why do people write Computer Viruses?
Primarily computer viruses are written to cause destruction, or to get personal information from you.
How do Computer Viruses work?
This following example is purely hypothetical just so you get the idea.
Joe Soap eagerly opens his email. He notices one from a friend with an attachment. The email says he must check out the attachment, because it's really cool. The attachment will normally end with .zip, .pif, .scr, .exe etc. He double clicks on the attachment, and may see something cool, or he may not. But little known to Joe, he is now infected with a computer virus! He continues checking his email, but in the meantime, the virus is spreading to all Joe's friends, without his knowledge.
Some computer viruses contain their own SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) engines. What does this mean? In order to spread to all Joe's friends in his address book, a virus will "steal" the email addresses, and send itself to all the addresses in Joe's address book. Joe will not notice an excessive amount of emails going out, because it will not use Joe's email software or server. It uses its own SMTP engine.
How to prevent computer viruses
Email viruses are the most common. Your first and foremost prevention is to never open email attachments unless you are expecting them. If you must satisfy your curiosity, rather save the email attachment to your hard drive first, and scan for any viruses before opening any attachment. But ensure that your virus scanner is up to date. A word of caution though, is that sometimes viruses spread rapidly before Antivirus vendors have a fix for them. Use caution and do not rely wholly on your virus scanner.
The most common email attachments to be wary of are :
.exe, .zip, .scr, .vbs, .bat, .com, .pif, .asp, .doc, .xls. However, this is not a conclusive list.
Many infected attachments carry a double extension, for example xxx.jpg.scr. These are a dead giveaway. However, ALWAYS practice caution.
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