About Viruses

What are computer viruses, Trojans and worms?

Simply stated, a virus, Trojan or worm is a small program written to cause harm to one or more computers or networks. A Virus, Worm or Trojan can also be designed to retrieve information from your computer to be delivered to an attacker for future use. For example credit card information, passwords, and security access codes.

More specifically, a virus is a parasitic program designed to enter a person's computer clandestinely. The virus attaches itself to files or boot sectors and is self-replicating.

A Trojan (or Trojan horse) is a malicious program that pretends to be a benign application. It is designed to cause your computer to do something that is unexpected. Since it does not spread (not self-replicating) it is not really a virus.

A worm is a parasitic program designed to replicate itself on your computer and then spread to other computers via email (through your address book) or an IRC (chat program). Coders design worms for advertising agencies to gain lists of legitimate email addresses for use in marketing. They can also be designed to slow down networks, thus giving other competitors an edge in their fields. Though this is not always the case, mostly they are just designed to create TCP/IP & SMTP chaos.

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How can I get rid of a virus, Trojan or worm?

If you know exactly which virus, Trojan or worm you are infected with, you can go to McAfee's or Symantec's website and lookup that particular virus, Trojan or worm. Instructions are given there for exactly how to remove the infection from your computer. Please note that in many cases you must be an advanced computer user to know how to carry out those instructions.

Another way is to start your computer from either a floppy boot disk or from the anti-virus software CD and let the anti-virus program remove the infection for you.

If you do not have anti-virus software (and you should) then you can go to Trend Micro's website and use their FREE online virus scanner. Note this scanner does not protect your computer. It will scan it for viruses, Trojan horses and worms and identifes which your computer is infected with and tries to clean it, but it will not protect you from another infection.

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