If your PC Security Protection is like mine...You won't worry about Viruses either.
Viruses have been around for more than 20 years. March 26th, 2007, was the 25th birthday of the first computer
If your PC Security Protection is like mine...You won't worry about Viruses either.
Viruses have been around for more than 20 years. March 26th, 2007, was the 25th birthday of the first computer virus observed in the wild. It was created by a 15-year-old named Rich Skrenta and it was called the "Elk Cloner". Ironically, the Elk Cloner infected an Apple computer as its first victim. Tell that one to a Mac-Man or Mac-Lady for giggles.
Listen up. These malicious codes are dangerous and they are spreading faster than we can stop them, and the cost of dealing with them is escalating. According to Internet Security Systems, one infected PC can easily reproduce at least 10 copies of a virus per second; exponentially, a virus can propagate worldwide in a matter of minutes. It isn't any surprise that earlier viruses were pretty straight forward and the means to remedy them were equally straight forward. But, with today's technology, advanced programming, hybrid attacks, polymorphic viruses, and sophisticated social engineering more than just software is needed to maintain a secure computer environment. It's time the general public and small business owners are provided the same professional (Enterprise) grade level technologies that government agencies, educational facilities, and large corporations have been provided. After all, the public and small business owners make up the majority of the Internet. Finally, what's been available to corporate America is now available to the general public; it's called managed security services.
What is a virus outbreak? According to the International Computer Security Association (ICSA) Labs' Virus Prevalence Survey 2004, a virus disaster is defined as "an incident in which 25 or more machines experienced a single virus at the same time", and/or incidents "that caused organizations significant damage or monetary loss." Another definition claims it depends on the software developer, but, typically it has to be a new or a new variant on a existing known virus. It must also have the potential to cause moderate or significant damage, the ability to become a widespread distribution, and have some presence established from varied sources.
The malware is a form of malicious code and its purpose is to be disruptive. Viruses vary from macro-viruses to Trojans to worms but, they all transfer from one computer to another without knowledge of the operator. All are classified as a virus and by definition, must change and infect other files with its own code in order to replicate or overwrite an entire file.
Generally there are three catergories of viruses:
Malicious-these commit irrevocable damage to the computer's system files, its programs, and to data held on storage media. These viruses attempt to steal and transmit user ID and password information.
Irritating-Personally, I haven't seen any of these for some time, but they are annoying activities with messages, annoying sounds, screen manipulations, and/or animated graphics.
Ineffective-A poorly written program that doesn't activate and is ineffective. However, it still clogs and slows down the system with clutter.
In addition to the three categories above, there are three types of PC viruses: boot sector, macro, and file-infecting.
A boot sector virus will deny you access to your hard disk when starting your computer and is usually found on a disk. The macro is a bit more specific and is targeted to spread through applications such as Microsoft Excel and Word.Once a macro has infected a global macro template, then the files are infected anytime the file is opened and running.The file-infecting virus targets executable files such as EXE and COM. Some file infectors (fast-file infectors) not only infect executed files but p