Computer Viruses

A detailed Summary of Computer Viruses

In the past two decades there have been great advances in technology that have reaped immense benefits towards us all. Computers are seen in almost every home and office in today's world. With these powerful machines we have limitless capabilities and with the added power of the Internet, anything that one could ever want is at their fingertips. Information is being transferred between computers at every second in time. However sometimes there are small hidden secrets to these transfers, viruses.

Viruses are computer programs that are created to infest and spread to other programs with copies of itself. They are run without the users request and are hidden in the background somewhere. They remain secret and perform their actions; most likely without the user knowing or able to compromise the actions they perform [1]. In a sense you can compare computer viruses to the taunt "Anything you can do I can better". Anything that a legitimate program can do, computer viruses can also do, only secretly [3]. Their behavior is just like that of a real virus, they spread and transfer between computers through networks, the Internet, and storage disks.

Not all viruses are considered fatal to your system. S

Hackers are the most active group developing and sharing the technological wisdom of how viruses work. They have great intellectual skills and not all of them are putting them to bad use creating malicious viruses. The actual harmful virus creators are averaged to be males between the ages of 14 and 24. Most of them do it simply for an ego trip [2]. In a sense there is a good guy, bad guy view towards them. Some find it creative and exciting to write a virus and spread it. In spite of this others find it more invigorating to impede them. They do this with programs that contain protection features that will anticipate the next phase of the virus [4]. They specialize these programs according to the type of viruses they want to try to stop.

Back in the 60's a man named John Conway carried out the initial work on self-replicating mechanisms, or what would today be called viruses. He never would have expected that the concept would later be twisted into destructive means. He opened the doors for using a machine as a powerful extension of the mind. His programs still remain fascinating to this day for their technical ingenuity and the beauty of the images that they create [4]. However they have come a long way since the 60's. Today hackers are planting viruses all over; the potential for getting a virus is much easier than before, especially now that the Internet is so commonly used [2]. Just a few years ago viruses were mainly spread through shared floppy disks, now one can infest into your system as you read your e-mail. Many people under-estimate the power of hackers and the viruses they write.

Command processor infectors (CPI's) are loaded before the command.com file in a DOS based system. This allows the viruses to examine the interaction of the user and computer by their input on the keyboard. This will allow them to remain hidden and still take advantage of the normal disk access through command.com commands. When a user types in data that will require the disk to be read the virus will step in and search and infect other command processors. The user will never suspect anything because he/she would normally expect the disk to be read at this time. After the virus finishes its task it will then carry out the user requested function with a slight delay, from the added functions. The user will probably never even notice. At least the hacker would hope so.

Viruses are usually distinguished by the area of the system that they infect. Some of the main t

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Approximate Word count = 1683
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Technology