What Is A Computer Virus?
It is necessary to understand what a virus is when it occurs in a living form (such as a human body, an animal, or a plant) before understanding what a computer virus is. Viruses are microorganisms that can only multiply within another living cell. Poor health occurs as a result of a viral infection and body cells are destroyed or damaged as a result.
Able to reproduce itself within another cell or body, the word virus is Latin for ‘poison’ and that is basically what it is - a ‘poison’, an example of an illness caused by a virus is the common cold. Cell damage occurs in the human body causing illness, whereas in the computer, files are damaged and the computer malfunctions. The computer virus can be anywhere on your pc, usually hidden within a program, file or document.
Criminals, and other talented idiots with nothing better to do with their time, create these viruses and spread them to other people’s computers. Creating trouble and damage for every pc user is the sole purpose of this activity. Similar to a common virus like the flu (which spreads from person to person), the computer virus has the ability to spread and ‘infect’ other computers, files or documents. Files and documents can have a computer virus spread through them such as word-processing documents, spreadsheets, emails, computer programs etc. It can spread itself through removable storage devices such as memory sticks and floppy disks, it can spread itself through the Internet and through local computer networks. It can be unknowingly spread to other computers by the computer user since it is hidden and therefore hard to detect.
Well, it works similarly to viruses (like the flu) that make a person sick. What each type of ‘digital virus’ will do to your computer depends on what it has been programmed to do, it can be very harmful, while others are created to simply annoy and will literally make your computer ’sick’. Some words used to identify various viruses are Macro Viruses, Email Viruses and Trojan Horses. Taking appropriate safety precautions with regard to your computer will be easier once you have an understanding of what computer viruses are and how they work.
