Computing viruses and how to prevent from them.
As computer users, we all know that we have the advantage of getting any type of information through many sources such as the internet, someone’s pen drive, CDs, DVD’s, etc. But a thing that not all of us know is that through all this sources we can infect our computer with some viruses and we may lose all of the information that we had in there.
There are many types of viruses that work in different ways in your PC, for example there is the Melissa virus, and this one was created by David L. Smith while he was working in a company in New Jersey. The virus works in a simple way, it enters to your computer through the e-mail system; when you open the e-mail file the virus immediately infects your computer and crashes it, and that is not all, the virus forwards itself to the first 50 e-mail addresses in the computer’s address book so if they open the e-mail they will be infected too.
Another type of virus is the Love Bug, this is the most famous virus in history and it was created by a Philippine man called Onel de Guzman. The Love Bug virus comes as an e-mail with an attachment which says “I love you”, so in that way people will open the e-mail and their computers will get infected, the virus sends itself to everyone in the person’s contact list. The Love Bug virus spread around the world really fast, infecting about 45 million computers. There is another virus that works in a similar way, the Trojan virus also enters to your computer via e-mail, but it also can infect your computer if you put a pen drive which has the virus in one of its files. Eventhough the Trojan virus is similar to the Love bug virus, it works in the computers in a different way; once it enters to your computer it downloads other programs that transform your computer into a server that sends information to the creator of this virus, in that way he can pick up all your information, like your passwords your credit cards information and it can erase all your information.
As you can see our computers can be infected in a lot of ways and we can lose all of our important information and besides we can make other computers get infected just by opening an e-mail. So you have to be careful when you have access to the Internet, because there are some websites that if you open them you can get a virus or when you have some programs to download music, such as “Ares” you also can get infected, since some songs, videos or movies that you download have viruses like the Trojan virus.
The best advice I can give you about protecting your PC from viruses is very simple; you just have to access to the net and download an antivirus, the antivirus protects your computer from threats, it works by scanning the files that you download or that you get from pen drives and identifying suspicious behavior from any computer program which might indicate infection, when this happens the antivirus gives you the option to delete that file.
So as we could see the viruses are terrible threatens for the computers, but if you have a good antivirus you do not have to worry so much.
