It Is Contagious :: essays papers

It Is ContagiousTraces of the Stealth_c Virus have been found in retention. Reboot to a unclouded scheme disk before continuing with this inst whollyation. This was themessage pure(a) back at me from one of the calculating machine monitors at my office.Questions raced through my mind. Stealth_c? Whats a system disk? Howam I supposed to install anti-figurer virus computer software if the computer systemalready has a virus? As a discouraging feeling of helplessness came overme, I thought of all the people who had loaded something from disk on thisbox or who had utilize this box to access the Internet. Because there was novirus protection in the first place, it was going to be very difficult todetermine how umpteen floppy disks and hard drives had been infected. Iwished I had learned about computer viruses a long time ago. What is acomputer virus, anyway? Is it a computer with a cold? A computer virusis called a virus because of three distinct similarities to a biologicalvirus. They are ? They must have the ability to make copies of, orreplicate, itself. ? They must have a need for a host, or functionalprogram to which it can attach. ? The virus must do some kind of harm tothe computer system or at least cause some kind of surprising or unwantedbehavior. Sometimes computer viruses just eat up memory or displayannoying messages, but the more risky ones can destroy info, givefalse information, or completely trap up a computer. The Stealth_c virusis a boot sector virus, significance that it resides in the boot sectors of acomputer disk and loads into memory with the normal boot-up programs. Thestealth in the name comes from the capability of this virus to peradventurehide from anti-virus software. Virtually any media that can carrycomputer data can carry a virus. Computer viruses are usually pass out bydata diskettes, but can be downloaded from the Internet, private publicizeboards, or over a local area network. This makes it extremely piano for av irus to spread once it has infected a system. The said(prenominal)Stealth_c virus was transported by the least likely avenue it waspackaged with commercial-grade software. This is an extremely rare occurrence,as most software companies go to slap-up lengths to provide cleansoftware. There is a huge commercial sideline in keeping computersvirus-free. Companies stand to lose literally thousands of dollars if theylose computer data to a virus. An immense amount of time can be lost frommore productive endeavors if someone has to check or clean each computer