Due to the latest developments in technology, global communication has become as easy as an internet dial up. This great ability to connect, also brings with it detrimental factors however, such as viruses. .
Viruses are purposely written programs that can negatively affect a computer by copying itself into the computer's files and performing actions without the user's permission. Viruses have been deliberately written to corrupt a computer's files. There are all different types of viruses, but they basically infringe on personal security and anonymity and destroy or deform data. .
There are several ways in which viruses can be caught, but viruses can only be caught from external sources, so if there are no external sources, virus protection would not be needed. The internet is a major source from which viruses are most commonly caught and then there are a couple of ways of doing this. One is to download a file from the Internet such as an email attachment, or in recent years viruses have become so advanced that by simply opening an email a virus can infect a computer. Opening any file also gives the possibility of catching a macro virus. Macro Viruses "hides" by using macro language and load into the computer's files as soon as it is activated. Another example of how a virus such as a boot sector virus is by the virus being present on a floppy disk, which is placed in the drive with start up causing the virus to be loaded into the hard drive. This however, occurs type of infection occurs less frequently today as the boot sector is no longer executed in drive A in most computers, but it is still possible if the virus is present on the hard disk. In other words at any time when data from an external source is received there is a potential for virus infection. .
An example of a virus is a file virus also called a program virus as it attaches to program files. These are usually obtained from the Internet or a program that is opened from the Web.
