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Awareness

Computer Viruses

Types of Infection

Viruses

A virus is a small piece of software that attaches itself on top of real programs. For example, a virus might attach itself to a program such as a word processing program. Each time the word processing program runs, the virus runs, too, and it has the chance to reproduce (by attaching to other programs) or just wreak havoc in general.

Email Viruses

An email virus moves around in email messages, and usually replicates itself by automatically mailing itself to dozens of people in the victim's email address book.

Worms

A worm is a small piece of software that uses computer networks and security holes to replicate itself. A copy of the worm scans the network for another machine that has a specific security hole. It copies itself to the new machine using the security hole, and then starts replicating from there, as well.

Trojan Horses

A Trojan horse is simply a computer program. The program claims to do one thing (i.e.. a computer game) but instead does damage when you run it. A Trojan Horses may even erase your hard disk. Trojan horses have no way to replicate automatically.