Different Types Of Viruses You Must Protect Your Computer From
There are a number of computer security threats that you must be aware of. Computer viruses are easily the most common computer security threat. There are a various types of viruses that you must protect your computer from. The viruses as they infect any computer start to replicate themselves. This results in consumption of computing resources and even destroys the programs and data on the infected computer.
Macro viruses are among the most common types of viruses. The reason is that such viruses are rather easy to write and they infect Microsoft Office files which are present on almost all computers running Windows. Melissa is one of the examples of a macro virus really going out of control. At any time there are thousands of viruses out there and most of them are in the wild.
Network viruses are other common computer viruses. These viruses generally limit their scope over a Local Area network though there have been instances when they have spread over the internet. The mainstay of network viruses is the computing resources which are shared by the entire LAN. Nimda and SQL Slammer are common examples of network viruses.
The third type of virus is the logic bombs. They are specially crafted in a manner that these viruses piggyback any other software. Logic bomb can also be designed to work on its own. These viruses are so designed that they would execute their payload when a specified condition is met. Take for example, a program executing a specified option or being run on a given day. Companion viruses are also known to be among a common type of viruses that you must protect your computer from. They take advantages of insecure nature of DOS though in some extremely rare companion viruses have also been able to exploit the Windows NT family command line interpreter. These viruses work by making copies of themselves with common file names but com or exe extension. They are executed with the command. Boot sector viruses are designed to render a computer system unbootable as they infect the boot sector of a computer. These viruses would not damage the data on the hard disk directly; instead they would attack the boot sector and partition table of the computer and thus destroy the file system directly. As better file systems have been developed, boot sector viruses have become very uncommon. Multipartite viruses are also other notorious types of viruses. They spread through removable storage devices. They would hide in the memory, move to the boot sector and attack all the program executable files and destroy the programs. Apart from this other types of viruses are being discovered from time to time by computer security experts.
Computer Viruses
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