Computer Viruses

The most widely publicised type of malware, the computer virus family, which includes self replicating worms and innocently packaged Trojans, are all a very common sight on PC’s these days. In the early days of computers, viruses would often spread via floppy disks, and their main objective was destruction of data, but these days the threats have evolved to make use of new communication methods and the authors appear to be after making money rather than mindless destruction.

With the growth in popularity of email came the emergence of the email borne virus threat, and now the growing trend of these viruses is to infect your machine, spread to as many others as possible, and to leave your computer open to receive instructions from the author. Typically, these authors have control of hundreds of thousands of these compromised or ‘zombie’ PC’s around the world, which form what is known as a ‘botnet’. The services of these botnets are sold for illegal purposes such as sending spam email, or for launching Denial of Service attacks on large websites.

Computer viruses are covered by all the leading anti-virus packages. If your computer has one of these installed and kept up to date with information about all the latest virus threats (the updates are often released weekly, sometimes daily), your computer should theoretically never get infected.

However, sometimes viruses spread at such a rate that you may receive one before the update has reached your machine, or it is possible that your anti virus software was not working at the time of the infection. When this is the case, rarely does a simple update of your anti-virus package followed by a full system scan solve the problem. Many viruses attempt to safeguard their hold on a compromised PC by disabling anti-virus software, and to block the installation of any new ones.

When this is the case, you are left with the option of either manually removing the virus, which often requires the skills of an IT security expert, or to use a virus removal tool. These tools are often made by the leading anti-virus vendors, and will specifically target a handful of the most prevalent threats. Most vendors have these tools available on their website for free download.

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