We have seen that software is the flesh that clothes the skeleton of the computer's hardware, and without it computer cannot function properly. Software is therefore an essential nay, indispensable and therefore desirable part of the computer system. While this is true, there is in existence the type of software that is most undesirable by the computer community. This software is called the computer virus. A computer virus is a small program that infects computer files by inserting copies of itself in those files.
The computer virus, although usually small is very powerful in destruction. It primary targets include files, other programs and parts of the computer. It can destroy or seriously damage information and data on files, it can install itself or several copies of itself in ram, hard disk, floppy disk, flash drive and boot sector of the computer.
Viruses have very high rate of replication and therefore spread at a very fast rate. The biggest problem with virus is that it can attach itself to any other software on the computer without cooperation or even knowledge of the computer user. Since the virus performs tasks that are detrimental to the computer operation, then it ha a great chance of causing serious problems to the user.
There are very many types of viruses. Some of them are written to attack specific parts of the software or hardware. Specific viruses include, partition section viruses, data virus, boot sector viruses, command file viruses and executable file viruses. The effects of the virus attacks on computer can be colossal and give a lot of painful and anxious moments to the computer user. These included corruption and loss of data even personal programs and documents on hard disk. Others include system crashes, destruction of hard disk partition, causing the computer not to boot, causing the program not to load and a host of other woes. This may cause a lot of waste of time and destruction of vital data arising from reformatting of infected disk and reinstalling of the back up files.
Nobody actually owns up being the first person to create a computer virus. Although it is a powerful software, it's badness has made nobody to take the credit for it's creation. To bad!
Despite this serious and dreadful nature of the problem, a careful and knowledgeable user can do very well without the danger of introducing virus into his system. You need a good and current anti-virus program. Update it regularly and test all diskette that come into the computer before copying from such diskettes into your disk.
