Virus & Antivirus

What is a Computer Virus?

• A computer virus is a small program written to alter the way a computer operates, without the permission or knowledge of the user.

• It has an ability to replicate itself, thus continues to spread. We can define compute virus also as a Malicious Software, a program that can cause damage to a computer.

• The computer viruses can damage or corrupt data, modify existing data, or degrade the performance of the system by utilizing resources such as memory or disk space.

• It may spread through internet, carried by a removable medium such as a Floppy disk, CD/DVD Drive, USB Drive and affect other computers

How Viruses Work?

● Computer viruses are called viruses because they share some of the traits of

biological viruses. A computer virus passes from computer to computer like a

biological virus passes from person to person.

● Some of the major viruses are Melissa, Up Next, MyDoom, ILOVEYOU, Red

Code, Nimda, Leap – A.

● A virus is a small piece of software that piggybacks on 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 and wreak

havoc.

● experts estimate that the MyDoom virus infected approximately a quarter-

million computers in a single day in January 2004.

What is an Antivirus?

An antivirus software is a computer program that identifies and removes computer viruses, and other malicious software like Worms and Trojans from an infected computer. Not only this, an antivirus software also protects the computer from further virus attacks.

We should regularly run an antivirus program to scanand remove any possible virus attacks from a computer.

How An Antivirus Works?

• The antivirus software examines each and every file in a computer.

• It also examines its content with the virus definitions stored in its virus dictionary.

• A virus dictionary is an inbuilt file belonging to an antivirus software that contains code identified as a virus by the antivirus authors.

Virus Updates

● An antivirus program should provide free virus updates on a periodic basis.

● Most commercial antivirus software in today’s scenario provide virus updates on daily basis.

How to use Antivirus software?

•Install antivirus software if you do not have it installed.

•Now, download the latest virus definitions updates from the internet.

•Perform a full system scan.

•The scan result may show some virus detection.

•Click Repair, Quarantine, Rename, Delete or Ignore as per your requirements.

Virus found!!

•Repair•Quarantine•Delete•Rename•Ignore

Popular Anti-Virus Softwares

By Naman BhatnagarVII - C