Due to the latest developments in technology, global communication has become as easy as an internet dial up. This great ability to connect, also brings with it detrimental factors however, such as viruses.
Viruses are purposely written programs that can negatively affect a computer by copying itself into the computer’s files and performing actions without the user’s permission. Viruses have been deliberately written to corrupt a computer’s files. There are all different types of viruses, but they basically infringe on personal security and anonymity and destroy or deform data.
There are several ways in which viruses can be caught, but viruses can only be caught from external sources, so if there are no external sources, virus protection would not be needed. The internet is a major source from which viruses are most commonly caught and then there are a couple of ways of doing this. One is to download a file from the Internet such as an email attachment, or in recent years viruses have become so advanced that by simply opening an email a virus can infect a computer. Opening any file also gives the possibility of c
There are ways to protect against virus damage and infringement of privacy such as using regularly updated anti-virus programmes, knowing the identity of the external sources from which data is received and generally being aware of the latest viruses. Whenever a file is opened at a computer, the user should know the identity of the sender from which they can judge wether this person would send them a virus. There is still the possibility that a virus may be sent unknowingly from the known source, but this is when anti-virus programmes come into play. An anti-virus programme needs to be updated regularly as new viruses are written everyday and the programme needs to know exactly how the virus works to be able to either reverse the damage or heal the data that has been corrupted. The easiest and cheapest way of regularly updating an anti-virus programme is by frequently downloading the update from the internet. Of course the best protection from viruses is to have no contact with any external sources, but in today’s fast technological world no one can afford that option. To ensure that a macro virus does not infect the compute