Computer Viruses

About Viruses :

Some viruses display obvious symptoms, and some cause damage to files in a system they have infected. A non-damaging virus is still a virus, not a prank and, other things being equal, viruses without obvious symptoms are more likely to spread further and persist longer than those that rapidly draw attention to themselves.

There are no 'good' viruses, simply because a virus is code that was not intentionally installed by the user. Users must be able to control their computers, and that requires that they have the power to install and remove software; that no software is installed, modified, or removed without their knowledge and permission. A virus is surreptitiously self-installed. It may modify other software in the system without user awareness, and removal can be difficult and costly.

Many viruses cause intentional damage. But many more cause damage that may not have been intended by the virus writer. For instance, when a virus finds itself in a very different environment than that for which it was written, what was intended to be a non-destructive virus can prove very destructive. A good case in point is the boot virus. Few, if any, boot viruses contain code to damage computers running Windows NT however, with many boot viruses, when they infect an NT machine system recovery can be quite tricky.

Even if a virus causes no direct damage to your computer, your inexperience with viruses can mean that damage occurs during the removal process. Many organizations have shredded floppies, deleted files, and done low-level formats of hard disks in their efforts to remove viruses. Even when removal is done perfectly, with no damage to the infected system or files, it is not normally done when the machine is first infected, and the virus in that machine has had a few weeks to spread. The social costs of infection include a loss of reputation and good will. This last point is increasingly significant recently with the rapid increase in network-aware and data stealing viruses.