Essay/Term paper: Information about viruses

Essay, term paper, research paper:  Information Technology

Information About Viruses


A growing problem in using computers is computer viruses. Viruses are pesky
little programs that some hacker with too much time on his hands wrote. Viruses
have been known to create annoyances from displaying messages on the screen,
such as "Your PC is now stoned," to completely obliterating everything that is
contained on the computer's hard disk. Viruses are transferred from computer to
computer in a number of ways. The most common way that users receive viruses at
home are downloading programs off the internet, or off of local Bulletin Board
Systems, or BBSs. These viruses are then transferred to a floppy disk when
written to by the infected computer. Computers can also be infected when a disk
that is infected with a virus is used to boot the computer. When this computer
is infected, every one who writes a floppy disk on this computer gets their
floppy disk contaminated, and risks getting this virus on their computer, which
may not have good virus protection. On IBM-Compatible PCs, viruses will only
infect executable programs, such as the .EXE and .COM files. On a Macintosh, any
file can be contaminated. A disk can also be infected even without any files on
it. These viruses are called BOOT SECTOR viruses. These viruses reside on the
part of the floppy disk, or hard disk that store the information so that these
disks can be used, and is loaded into memory each time the computer is booted by
one of these disks.

DON'T DESPAIR!

Despite all of what has just been said, viruses are controllable. Their is
software called Virus Protection Software. A couples of programs that have been
proven to work are F-PROT and McAfee's Virus Scan. These programs scan the
computer's memory and the files contained on the hard disk each time the program
is executed. These programs also resided on the computer's memory. These
programs will help reduce the spread of viruses.