In today's world it is impossible to run a large organisation without the aid of computers. Businesses hold massive amounts of important data, hospitals hold large amounts of confidential patient information and large scientific research projects hold important codes, formulae, and equations. The bottom line is that loss or corruption of this information is sure to result in bankruptcy, a substantial loss of customers, and even world-wide financial meltdown. A dependency on technology is impossible to avoid - even with its fatal consequences. Companies face the worry of information lost through hacking, virus corruption, and even physical threats such as fire and flood. Viruses are the most common threat to companies they can corrupt large amounts of files and data both kinds of virus, biological and electronic, take over the host cell/program and clone their carrier genetic codes by instructing the hosts to make replicas of the viruses. Neither kind of virus, however, can replicate themselves independently; they are pieces of code that attach themselves to other cells/programs, Just as biological viruses need a host cell,

computer viruses require a host program to activate them. Once such example of the damage done by viruses occurred in 1988. A Cornell University hacker named Robert Morris used the national network system Internet, which include the Pentagon's ARPAnet data exchange network. The nation's high-tech ideologues and spin doctors have been locked in debate since, trying to make ethical and economic sense of the event. The virus rapidly infected an estimated six thousand computers around the USA This created a scare that crowned an open season of viral hysteria in the media, in the course of which, according to the Computer Virus Industry Association in Santa Clara, the number of known viruses jumped from seven to thirty during 1988, and from three thousand infections in the first two months of that year to thirty thousand in the last two months. While it caused little in the way of data damage (some richly inflated initial estimates reckoned up to $100m in down time), the ramifications of the Internet virus have helped to generate a moral panic that has all but transformed everyday "computer culture." Other worrying viruses include "Pathogen" which was created by Christopher Pile. This fatal virus wiped data from a computers hard drive, in 1995 he was convicted under the Computer misuse attack. Stephen

Some common words found in the essay are:
Dr Solomon's, Steps Minimise, Meanwhile BT, Santa Clara, Pentagon's ARPAnet, Fleming BT, Christopher Pile, Robert Morris, backup files, Cornell University, computer misuse, fire flood, anti-virus package, anti-virus software, files building, backup files building,
Approximate Word count = 879
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)