What is a virus?

Any modern man, even the 100 year old grandmother (who saw the computer 2 times) know that this virus. We hear about viral epidemics in the news, our friends regularly complain that they have problems due to viruses, one who reads this article does not once encountered viruses. So what is a virus?

Computer virus - a kind of computer programs, a distinctive feature of which is the ability to reproduce. Through this they are able to infect other computers, as well as the influenza virus is transmitted from person to person. In addition, viruses can damage or completely destroy files and user data, as well as to damage or even destroy the operating system with all files as a whole.

"Dummies" is sometimes referred to as computer viruses and other malware such as trojans, spyware and even spam. A true virus can only spread from one computer to another when its host is taken to the target computers.

There are tens of thousands of computer viruses that spread via the Internet worldwide, by viral epidemics. Viruses spread, introducing themselves to executable code from other programs or replacing other programs. For some time it was thought that, as a program, the virus can infect only program. Changing the file are not the program - no contamination, but only damage to data. Because it did not use the processor as instructions. Thus, for example, unformatted text could not be a carrier of the virus.

But the latest bad guys have that viral behavior could not only executable code containing the machine code processor. Viruses have been written in the language of a batch file. Then there macroviruses implementing through macros in documents such programs as Microsoft Word and Excel.

After the crackers have created viruses that use vulnerabilities in popular software (eg, Adobe Photoshop, Internet Explorer, Outlook), the normal data processing. Viruses have been spread through the introduction of images, texts, etc.

The following publications you more details about what is a virus. To be continued!


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