Threats: Viruses

Introduction

Hi, I'm Luca and I am a student in year 10 at St. Francis Xavier's College in Woolton, Liverpool. One of the subjects I am currently studying at school is ICT, and I am going to share my knowledge and understanding of this subject with everyone in a series of blogs. In this particular blog, I will be discussing viruses. I hope that you enjoy this blog, and come away learning something new which you can hopefully pass on to someone else.


What is a Virus

A virus is a piece of program code that makes copies of itself by attaching itself to another program. The virus can sometimes destroy and change files.

While viruses are commonly malicious, by either destroying data or crashing network services, many just do nothing and are usually very annoying. For example, displaying a data message to the user. A majority of viruses are made to be delayed before they actually do anything, commonly destroying data on a certain day or week, such as a holiday.


Viruses are spread in many ways, usually by either a computer network, by e-mail, or by removable media such as a memory stick or a floppy disk.


How to Avoid Them

The best way to avoid them is by purchasing a good, well known anti-virus software such as Norton or Mcafee, and then install it onto your computer. Make sure that you update your particular anti-virus software regularly too.

You should also perform regular security scans on your PC to see whether any unwanted software or anything else has got onto your PC. If you are about to download something or open an attachment, then you should scan these aswell, in case either of them contain viruses.

Another way to avoid viruses is to only use trusted websites on the internet, and not websites which you have never heard of before. If you do want to go on a website which you have never heard of, make sure you do your research on it to check whether it is a potentially dangerous website, and one which could cause all sorts of harm to your PC.

Finally, you should never download anything from untrusted websites, and websites which are genuine. For example, if you wanted to download Microsoft Office and you thought it was too expensive, you may try to download either a free, or much cheaper version of it. However, this may contain viruses, and you should therefore not download it.