What Is Virus?

6 Pages 1605 Words

Introduction
Almost every computer user in the world has heard of computer viruses. Many even have had the misfortune of experiencing a virus attack at some point in their usage.
Virus attacks are becoming more prevalent than ever before. Yearly thousands of people suffer often-irrecoverable damage to their systems and data. Yet many do not even know what hit them let alone what they can do to avoid a recurrence.
When it comes to virus attacks, ignorance is certainly not bliss. Indeed the best possible weapon against preventing a virus attack is knowledge. We need to know how virus enters into our computer system, how they infect our system and how they eventually spread and cause more damage.
What Is Virus
The first step in any virus attack is always the invasion. This is when the virus actually enters the computer system from an outside source. Much of the effort in preventing a virus attack lies in understanding what these virus entry points are and how best to monitor and block out any possible intrusion. All viruses enter the computer system through two main entry points: the disk drives and the network adapter cards. The disk drives may be any sort of disk drive (hard, floppy, CD, Zip, Jazz and what have you). This makes any disks or CDs that you insert into these drives a possible source of virus infection. The network adapter card is most likely your computer network and/or modem card connected to the local Intranet and/or the Internet. Virus enters through the network card most likely disguised in the form of attachments in e-mails. These attachments are often program files and office documents containing macros. Besides this, certain WebPages that we visit on the Internet may also contain harmful programming codes that might transfer virus or virus-like codes into our system. To guard our systems against virus intrusion from these sources, many good anti-virus programs allows users to completely scan all files read fo...