In the rapidly changing world of technology today with people possessing different types of computers, the virus is also taking matching the trends. By the way, did I define the virus? Guess not!! A virus is a computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer without permission or knowledge of the user. The term “virus” can be used to refer to many different types of malware programmes. They share some of the traits of biological viruses. Strange as it may sound, the computer virus is something of an information age awesome sight. If properly engineered virus can have a devastating effect, disrupting productivity with billions of dollars in damages. Experts estimated that the Mydoom worm infected approximately a quarter-million computers in a single day in January 2004. Melissa virus forced Microsoft and other very large companies to completely turn off e-mail systems until the virus could be contained. The ILOVEYOU virus in 2000 also had a similarly devastating effect. That is pretty impressive when you consider that many viruses are incredibly simple. Samson A. Sewanyana, an information technology specialist says there are about many different forms of electronic infections. Virus - A virus is a small piece of software allied with real programs. For example, a virus might attach itself to a program such as a spreadsheet program. Each time the spreadsheet program runs, the virus runs, too, and it has the chance to reproduce by attaching to other programs. E-mail virus – This one travels as an attachment to e-mail messages, and usually replicates itself by automatically mailing itself to dozens of people in the victim’s e-mail address book. Some e-mail viruses don’t even require double-clicking. Trojan horse - Is simply a computer program that claims to do or be one thing; it may claim to be a game but instead does damage like erasing the hard disk when you run it. Trojan horses have no way to replicate automatically. Worm - Is a small piece of software that uses computer networks and security holes to replicate itself. A copy of the worm scans the network for another machine that has a specific security hole and copies itself to it through the security hole, and immediately starts replicating from there, as well. Computer protection against viruses According to Sewanyana, if truly worried about traditional viruses, you should be running a more secure operating system like UNIX. There are no viruses on these operating systems because the security features keep viruses (and unwanted human visitors) away from your hard disk. • But if using an unsecured operating system, then buying virus protection software is a nice safeguard. • If you simply avoid programs from unknown sources (like the Internet), and instead stick with commercial software purchased on CDs, you eliminate almost all of the risk from traditional viruses. • Make sure that Macro Virus Protection is enabled in all Microsoft applications, and you should NEVER run macros in a document unless you know what they do. There is no good reason to add macros to a document, so avoiding all macros is a great policy. • Never double-click on an e-mail attachment that contains an executable. Attachments that come in as Word files (.DOC), spreadsheets (.XLS), images (.GIF), or any data files and can do no damage. But take note of the macro virus problem in Word and Excel documents. Nevertheless, some viruses now come in through .JPG graphic file attachments. A file with an extension like EXE, COM or VBS is an executable, and an executable can do any sort of damage it wants. Once you run it, you have given it permission to do anything on the machine. The only defense is never to run executables that arrive via e-mail. Contact: eddiemukaaya@yahoo.com
