There are over 30,000 known computer viruses and new viruses are being written every day. The number of computer hoaxes (lies) is not as high as the number of viruses, but for the many computer users, who may believe the false information, hoaxes can cause them a lot of emotion and wasted time. The hoaxes are annoying but, if the user can recognize them, can be easily deleted. It is the threat of a computer virus that is the most important to a user because no system is immune to a virus infection. There are methods for detecting a virus, eliminating it and protecting the system from further trouble.

A computer virus is a piece of software designed to enter a system and infect the files. A virus will duplicate itself and try to infect as many files and systems as possible. If the hard disc is infected and the user saves a file to disk, it will probably infect the disk and will be passed on to other systems that use the infected disc. On the other way, if a virus-infected disk is introduced to the system, it will infect the system. ("What Is A Virus?" 1)

There are four main types of computer viruses; boot sector, file or program, macro, and multipartite. T

The conclusion is that there are ways to protect a computer system from a virus through the use of anti-virus software. Even when a virus is detected, there are solutions for cleaning and restoring the hard drive. A user cannot be assured the system is totally protected because some viruses are introduced without his/her knowing it. Still, the best

Finally, the multipartite viruses have characteristics like the boot sector viruses and the file viruses. They can start out in the boot sector and then spread to the system's applications or the other way around. (Types of Viruses 2) There are other programs called "worms" or "Trojan horses" that are not viruses but have the same effect. These worms replicate themselves by e-mail, "making use of any Outlook address books" (Types of Viruses 2).

he boot sector viruses are usually transmitted by an infected floppy disk that is left in the disc drive and then the system is rebooted. The virus is then read from the floppy to the master boot record of the hard drive and when the computer is booted up, the virus goes into the system's memory. (Types Of Viruses 1) File or program viruses are "pieces of viral code that attach themselves to executable programs. Once the infected program is run, the virus is transferred to your system's memory and may replicate itself further" (Types of Viruses 1). The macro viruses are the most common because they infect files run by applications that use macro languages (Microsoft Word or Excel). The look like any other macro in the file, but when the file is opened, the virus executes commands understood by the macro language. Macro viruses can exist inside any document whose application uses a macro language, such as the Melissa of a few years ago. Melissa was passed on through Microsoft Word documents. All a user with a clean version of Microsoft Word had to do was open an infected Word document, which t

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Approximate Word count = 1285
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)