COMPUTER VIRUSES
Although the term “viruses” is often misapplied to all infections computers may suffer, in reality, it specifically refers to a program that is commonly attached to another program (e.g., Word Document or spreadsheet) and can replicate itself. Every time the program is run, the virus replicates itself, attached to a new document. In time, a virus can completely bog a computer down to a crawl.

Viruses may also infect a boot sector or partition sector. In some cases, these latter viruses corrupt the sectors, making it impossible to reboot the computer.

Sometimes viruses have built-in timers. They await a specific date and time, then do a predetermined task like completely erasing your hard drive.

A common way to pick up these viruses is by loading someone else’s infected files into your system or loading an infected file off the Internet.

Email viruses are somewhat different. They spread through email. You are typically asked to open an attachment that will contain the virus.

Only by having an up-to-date virus scanner and being very careful how you handle unknown files can you be reasonably confident your computer is safe. Next