softwarevolution

Viruses, Worms, and Trojans - Their Existence, Their Destructive Ability, and Our Defense

1. Its Existence Virus is a computer program designed to inflict some damage in computers. Virus, like its name, shares some elements that are possessed by its counterpart in the flesh and blood world namely the ability to multiply itself and infect another computer. Any removable media such as floppy disk and flash disk without any protection or encryption can easily be hitchhiked by a virus to spread on another computer. Optical disc such as CD or DVD not like general assumption can easily become one of the medium. Why? Because not like the old days when CDs are produced by large corporate who has clean systems to produce these kind of media, nowadays CD and DVD can be produced in any house in the world with very poor protection of virus. The chance of a virus to even spread its wings is by occupying a server system to which dozens to thousands of computers are connected. Internet is a true 'marketplace' for this kind of threat to spread as easy as toxic gas spread out in the air. Other threats that lurk on the world of unknown are worm and Trojan. While worm refer to program that can find its own way to the targeted computer even if it is not transferred intentionally, Trojan is a program that appears or promote itself unharmed but actually has the ability to do some damage. Some Trojans even introduce themselves as viruses or worm busters, but actually they are the culprit themselves. 2. Its destructive ability Ok, so now you know the enemies, 'What's the fuss, boss?' you might asked. Well the effects of these beasts can range from harmless display of message(s) in your desktop to destruction of your entire system (its application and operating system). Most of the time, a Virus can make your computer or network running slow because their activity running in the background take lot of CPU resources. Another type of virus multiplies itself into every folder in your PC thus taking an inconsiderably high amount of hard drive space. It doesn't stop there because the process of multiplying itself takes CPU resources. So it's really annoying when you are in the middle of a task that really needs CPU power. Even worse, another kind of virus prevents you from booting at all. Even if you succeed in booting Windows up, the virus will sense any attempt you do to remove it. So for instance you are triggering an antivirus scanner command or running 'Run' command to use 'msconfig' panel (Ms Configuration utilities) to disable some startup programs, then the virus will initialize to restart the computer by itself. Very, very Annoying huh? Well, Irritating more precisely. 3. Our effort in building a defense We can advise you to activate your windows firewall feature to prevent an unwanted application and internet processes to access your system. Or you may want to try system virtualization in which you have a cloned (virtual) system running on your original copy so that when virus related disaster come, your original system are safe. But most of the time, these are not quite effective. We also will tell you a simple argument: Even if you know everything about computer, and you even might seems to know every pattern of new viruses, worms, and Trojans, the effort of fighting against virus attacks is a day and night struggle. While unfortunately, you need something to replace your place there so that you can do something else more important, your hobby, and your job (well except if your job is in antivirus agency). Thus, the only solution is that to build something that can automate itself in building the defense and can update itself whenever new threat appears. Yes, it is a program we all called as antivirus. There are so many antivirus software out there, from freeware to trial ware (meaning that you can try it out for a period of time until the license is expired, usually the period is 30-days). But before you moan more, there are a lot of free antivirus programs that are quite powerful out there. Here are six of our recommendations: 1. AVG Free Edition 2. Avira AntiVir 3. Avast! Home Edition 4. ClamWin 5. Comodo Anti-Virus 6. PC Tools Anti-Virus