Within this complex environment, exists computer viruses. There is no exact and concrete definition for a computer virus, but over time some commonly accepted facts have been related to them. All viruses are programs or pieces of programs that reside in some form of memory. They all were created by a person with the explicit intent of being a virus. For example, a bug (or error) in a program, while perhaps dangerous, is not considered a computer virus due to the fact that it was created on accident by the programmers of the software. Therefore, viruses are not created by accident. They can, however, be contracted and passed along by accident. In fact it may be weeks until a person even is aware that their computer has a virus. All viruses try to spread themselves in some way. Some viruses simply copy clones of themselves all over the hard drive. These are referred to as cloning viruses. They can be very destructive and spread fast and easily throughout the computer system.

Do to the severity of some viruses, people have devised methods of detecting and eradicating them. The anti-viral programs will scan the entire hard drive looking for evidence that viruses may have infected it. These programs must be told very specifically what to look for on the hard drive. There are two main methods of detecting viruses on a computer. The first is to compare all of the viruses on the hard disk to known types of viruses. While this method is very precise, it can be rendered totally useless when dealing with a new and previously unknown virus. The other method deals with the way in which a common cloning virus adapts. All that a cloning virus really does is look at what operations the computer is executing and react and adapt to them by making more copies of itself. This is the serious flaw with cloning viruses: all the copies of itself look the same. Basically all data in a computer is stored in a byte structure format. These bytes, which are analogous to symbols, occur in specific orders and lengths. Each of the cloned viruses has the same order and length of the byte structure. All that the anti-virus program has to do is scan the hard drive for byte structures that are duplicated several times and delete them. This method is an excellent way of dealing with the adaptive and reproducing format of cloning viruses. The disadvantage is that it can produce a number of false alarms such as when a user has two copies of the same file.

Computer viruses are extremely dangerous programs that will adapt themselves to the ever changing environment of memory by making copies of themselves. Cloning viruses create exact copies of themselves and attach to other files on the hard drive in an attempt to survive detecti

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Approximate Word count = 1829
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)