» Computer Viruses And How They Work

By Fred Roe

If you are alive, then more than likely you have heard of a computer virus. You may not know what it is exactly, but more than likely you have heard of them, and you may even be a little fearful of these mysterious things that you've heard can wreak havoc on your computer.

This will be an overview of what viruses are and how they work, so that you can be educated about them. For right now, there are basically four types of virus terms that you should concern yourself with. They are: viruses, trojan horses, worms, and e-mail viruses.

Viruses

A virus is basically a small piece of software that attaches itself to a useful program and begins to disrupt your programs and the functioning of your computer. For instance, a virus could attach itself to something like your spreadsheet program, and every time that you run and use that same program, the virus runs itself too. It even has the chance to continue to reproduce and spread itself to other programs and create further problems.

Trojan Horses

A Trojan horse, just as the name implies, is a computer program that comes in disguise as one thing, but it really is something else. For example, you may be thinking that you have a computer program that is actually a computer game, but what it really is is a program that causes damage when you run it, possibly even erasing your entire hard drive.

Worms

What a Worm does is search for security holes in networked computers. Once it finds such a breach in the network's security system, it copies itself to the computer and then it begins replicating itself over and over again.

E-mail Viruses

The way that e-mail viruses do their damage is by traveling as an attachment to an e-mail message. It is able to replicate itself by mailing itself to dozens of the folks in your e-mail address book. And although some e-mail viruses require that you double click them to launch them, some of them don't.