Viruses

You’re probably familiar with viruses, as they have been around the longest and
most people are familiar with “virus software,” more accurately termed virus
detection and removal software.

A computer virus is normally an executable program that arrives on your
computer hidden within something else, like an email, or an email attachment.
The typical computer virus is designed, very simply, to cause you, your
computer, and other computers, problems.

You may wonder why anyone would bother to develop software specifically to
cause problems, and the motives are as complex as the motives for any bad
behavior. Some viruses have been developed by programmers to see what could
accomplish, in a mischievous way.

Some have been developed to hurt certain companies or industries by, for
example, aggrieved ex employees or nefarious competitors. Some have been
developed for political or other purposes – including, debatably, actual
terrorism, since “denial of service” and other virus-based online attacks can
make communications stop for a while.

We’re more concerned with what they do and how to stop them than why
people bother to invent and disseminate them in the first place.

What Viruses Do

What viruses do varies but it is always bad, if sometimes amusing.

Some will try to destroy your computer (on the software level, although some
will actually “physically” harm your hard drive disks). Some will simply
replicate themselves, for example, sending copies of themselves to everyone in your Microsoft Outlook contact lists, then to everyone in theirs, and so on (these
are called worms). Some will be programmed to create huge amounts of traffic
onto certain websites – such as a major corporate site, a major commerce site or
major news outlet site – to cause the site to become unusually slow or to stop
working altogether.

Some viruses are supposed to be humorous. They may make little sheep dance
across your screen, or make your keyboard make belching sounds when you
type.

Some viruses, often called “worms” will actually make your system misbehave
in specific ways – such as redirecting your attempts to visit a certain site to
another site. One famous worm recently redirected Google searches in a scheme
that sent surfers to a German-based site that exactly replicated Google, except
served all ads from the people sponsoring the worm!

Some viruses are not funny at all, and can destroy data that cannot be recovered
While spyware and other bad software will often need to be removed rather tha
prevented, viruses should be prevented, and the good news is, that’s pretty eas
to do.

The most important, and luckily easiest, step any computer owner or
administrator can do is to install, enable, update and continually run a quality
security program that checks for viruses.

There are dozens of software brands out there but there are two that even now
are head and shoulders above the rest, Norton, and McAfee.

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