The Computer Virus - What is it Exactly?

The chore of removing computer viruses and preventing future infections has become big business in the technology world. Before you start the fight against these viruses it's a good idea to get to know your enemy first. If you can understand your enemy then you can defeat him.

Viruses feat neatly into the malware category of software - malware is just a shortened version of malicious software. Always wondered that eh?

It's always funny to watch some Hollywood hacker movie and to see a virus on a computer screen with a laughing skull and a voice message about how you've just been hacked. That's so much crap! Real viruses - the really good ones - stay hidden. The arrive in e-mail attachments or hidden other programs and they stay hidden until it's time to attack. Computer viruses are very much like human viruses - they need someplace to live first and reproduce and then they appear when the time is right.

Once the virus is activated and has spread around your computer system then the damage phase will begin. Most viruses are written to activate on a specific trigger - a time, date or once the virus has infected x number of files. Once the trigger point is reached the virus then delivers its payload to your system. This might be just annoying messages or it might trash your entire operating system and leave you staring at a blank screen. Once you've had this happen to you once it never happens again believe me.

Back in the day computer viruses were spread mostly on floppy disks and this was bad enough. Then the Internet arrived and proved to be massively popular with everyone (how wrong could Bill Gates be?) and viruses started spreading even more quickly by e-mail and downloaded files. A virus that used to take weeks or months to travel around the world was now able to infect computers all over the globe in just a few hours.

As it stands right now very, very few computers are still supplied with floppy drives to viruses have moved online and they're still spreading from there right now. I get an average of 10 - 15 attempted virus infections every week and that's with me being very careful about my e-mail, virus, spyware and firewall protection.

Worms are another ""type"" of computer virus but they're just a little bit different. A worm is able to reproduce itself and move around networks without using other programs or software as hosts.

Worms are usually more damaging to networks of computers than to individual computers. Because they self-reproduce they can cause damage by overloading network resources. This overload can cause slowdowns on the network by taking up a lot of bandwidth on the network itself. Like viruses, worms are sometimes designed to carry a payload. This is done by using a 'backdoor' on the target system.

Last but not least is the trojan virus. Named after the legend from the Trojan Wars where the Greeks used a gigantic wooden horse to trick the Trojans into bringing it inside their city walls as a gift the trojan virus does the same thing on a computer. It pretends to be something else in an attempt to sneak onto your computer. Most hackers will use a trojan virus to install a keylogger on your computer or to provide a backdoor for a hacker to install some other piece of software that's going to cause you headaches by stealing personal and financial information.

Don't be fooled into thinking that viruses disappeared when floppy disks became extinct - if anything the problem is now worse than ever. Why do you think there's new anti-virus companies appearing every year?