Boot Sector Computer Viruses
The boot sector viruses was a whole lot more popular in the eighties. This was when computer technology actually hit the mainstream. Quite like the name, boot sector viruses infect the boot sectors of a computer. These boot sectors are usually located in the bootable disk or in particular location in your computer hard drive. A number of these boot sector viruses in the past include names such as Disk Killer and others like Michelangelo. The damage caused by boot sector viruses can be devastating, varying from individual file loss to entire directories .
Companion Viruses
These sorts of viruses usually affect your computer by infecting your computers operating system. They work by creating a dangerous program that looks like the other valid files that are on your computer. These programs accompany other files that exist on your computer, so you may end up executing a virus instead of the program that you really wanted to run. These types of viruses can wait in memory for a program to run and can easily replicate.
Email Viruses
These sorts of viruses use e-mail in order to transmit viruses from one computer to the other. Someone may send you an e-mail that has an attachment that has a virus in it. When you open the attachment your computer gets infected. Some of them actually copy themselves to all the e-mail addresses in your address book and the virus gets to spread as quickly as it can. Avoid opening e-mails from anyone that you don't know. Some e-mail programs actually now come with the capability to scan through attachments with antivirus programs. They can easily identify any virus programs before you would even spot them.
Macro Viruses
Macro viruses are small programs which can infect files created with certain applications, including word processing and spreadsheet office suites. These little programs can take advantage of the program's built in macro programming tools to perform maliciously.
Polymorphic Viruses
Polymorphic viruses actually will hide themselves each time they infect a system, making it nearly impossible to be detected by anti-virus string or signature searches. Because these types of viruses encrypt or encode themselves differently every time, they are more difficult to detect and are able to easily replicate large numbers of new instances of themselves. Basically it adapts, changes its own code, and replicates all on its own.
Trojan horse viruses
Trojan horse viruses are actually malware, they are usually thought of as viruses because of the amount of damage that they can do to your computer. These viruses are actually quite tricky; they appear as something as innocuous as a screensaver or game. When you install the program you end up with a virus on your system. The virus may then leave a backdoor for hackers to enter into your computer. When these hackers enter they can then proceed to steal personal information such bank account and credit card information, and even passwords. This is one of the more common viruses seen today.
Worm Viruses
Worm Viruses have the ability to easily and quickly duplicate themselves, occupying tremendous amounts of computer resources while it wreaks havoc on your computer and network.
If you want to protect yourself from computer viruses such as the types listed above. It is absolutely essential that you obtain the best protection software available. We recommend using Sophos Virus scan. It's important to make sure your anti-virus software is as up to date as possible, as new infections are discovered each day. You may also want to invest in a firewall that helps prevent other people accessing your computer. Once a computer is infected with a virus, it is unsafe to keep using this system; it can damage files and send to your contacts through email. You should also make regular backups of your data and keep this unconnected to your system, to restore your files if necessary.
