Computer Viruses essays

Computer Viruses essays 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 todays 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. Some are simply benign and are just annoying. However most are malicious and they can destroy and alter data on your system. Once one is on a host computer it can attach itself to other software programs and remain hidden in them. Here it could begin attacking the system immediately or stay idle until it is later activated. The affects of the viruses are limitless. The actual costs in damage that viruses cause can be in millions, not to mention the effects if someone were to hack into the air traffic controllers and cause plane crashes. There is an unrealized potential for harm with computer viruses [4]. Back in the 60s a man named John Conway carried out the initial work on self-replicating mecha...