Anti Virus Software

Anti Virus Software

People create viruses that eat up your computer, ruin the hard drive and delete months worth of work. Why? The most common reason is for the thrill. The thrill of destruction; there was always that kid from down the street that liked building fires and blowing things up. Also the thrill of bragging rights that they wrote the code that crashed 250,000 PCs. These people don't seem to understand (or care) that they are ruining personal property and in some cases careers, just for the thrill of it.

What is a virus?

There are four types of viruses written to destroy computers, each in a different way and with a different name, but all have the same purpose.

An actual virus is a small piece of software that piggybacks on other programs. Much like a biological virus, computer viruses have to ride on something else in order to run. Once the virus has attached itself, it is ready to infect other programs or documents.

A worm is a computer program that can replicate itself from machine to machine. Worms move around through computer networks, slipping through security holes in the operating system. One of the most famous worms was the Code Red worm designed in 2001. Its purpose was to replicate itself for the first 20 days of each month, replace web pages on infected servers with a page that read “Hacked by Chinese” and launch an attack on the White House web server in order to overwhelm it. It made a mess of things.

The email virus is the new rage. It moves around in email messages and replicates itself by automatically mailing itself out to dozens of people in the victim's address book. After that it will start corrupting files on the machine.

The last of these is the Trojan horse. A Trojan horse is simply a program that claims to be one thing, such as a game or a word processor, and instead does damage to your machine if you run it.

Anti-virus software is an attempt to protect your machine from these. By scanning your hard drive on a regular basis and also monitoring incoming mail messages and alerts—you are kept abreast of everything going into and coming out of your PC.

An ounce of prevention

Antivirus software can only do so much. If you are really worried about your machine here are some tips for keeping it safe.
  • Try running off of an operating system like UNIX—viruses rarely hit these systems because of the security features.
  • Make sure your virus protection software is always updated.
  • Avoid using programs or opening emails from unknown sources.
  • Never double click on an attachment that contains an executable file; these would appear with an extension like EXE, COM or VBS. An executable can do anything it wants, and once you have run it, you have given it permission to do anything to your machine
    • .

By Lisa Sharp           


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