Information About Viruses Essay, Research Paper

Information About Viruses

A growing problem in using computers is computer viruses. Viruses are pesky

little programs that some hacker with too much time on his hands wrote. Viruses

have been known to create annoyances from displaying messages on the screen,

such as “Your PC is now stoned,” to completely obliterating everything that is

contained on the computer’s hard disk. Viruses are transferred from computer to

computer in a number of ways. The most common way that users receive viruses at

home are downloading programs off the internet, or off of local Bulletin Board

Systems, or BBSs. These viruses are then transferred to a floppy disk when

written to by the infected computer. Computers can also be infected when a disk

that is infected with a virus is used to boot the computer. When this computer

is infected, every one who writes a floppy disk on this computer gets their

floppy disk contaminated, and risks getting this virus on their computer, which

may not have good virus protection. On IBM-Compatible PCs, viruses will only

infect executable programs, such as the .EXE and .COM files. On a Macintosh, any

file can be contaminated. A disk can also be infected even without any files on

it. These viruses are called BOOT SECTOR viruses. These viruses reside on the

part of the floppy disk, or hard disk that store the information so that these

disks can be used, and is loaded into memory each time the computer is booted by

one of these disks.

DON’T DESPAIR!

Despite all of what has just been said, viruses are controllable. Their is

software called Virus Protection Software. A couples of programs that have been

proven to work are F-PROT and McAfee’s Virus Scan. These programs scan the

computer’s memory and the files contained on the hard disk each time the program

is executed. These programs also resided on the computer’s memory. These

programs will help reduce the spread of viruses.