Anti-Spy Advice Page

What is a virus? A virus is a little program that hides on your system by attaching its self to another file or over writing it completely, when this file is executed the virus is loaded into memory, once loaded the virus can do whatever it is written to do so.

It can transmit its self to other computers in many different ways, what seems to be the most popular way these days is via the internet, either by e-mail, file sharing programs such as Kazaa or vulnerabilities in windows and explorer. There are other ways in can be transmitted, it can copy its self to a portable media device such as a floppy or cd, when this floppy or cd is then placed and run on another computer, that computer is then infected. WARNING you can even get a virus from just visiting an internet site, just by viewing the page even without downloading anything at all.

The next stage of a virus once it has transmitted its self as much as possible, is to drop its payload as its called, it can do this immediately or wiat until a given command or date such as the famous Friday the 13th or April 1st viruses, these are just a few of 10s of thousands of viruses and variations. The payload can do anything at all, such as totally formatting your main drives, moving/deleting/adding or editing files, and basically anything, the possibilities are endless, viruses or their writers are getting ever more intelligent.

Where do viruses come from? Who knows, bored students, people who just want to fool around, people with personal vendettas against companies/people, basically anyone with good computer knowledge can bang together a virus, this is why viruses are so wide spread and so many.

You can protect your self from viruses with one of the following anti-virus programs, my personal favourite is Norton Anti-virus, very close runner-up is McAfee's Online, these are the most popular virus killers on the market and well worth paying for. Another well-documented alternative is PC-Cillian & for windows XP only Vexira XP, I have read many good reviews about all of these products, personally I think it's everybody to there own. WARNING do not attempt to install two virus killers at the same time, it is possible but not for the basic user. I do not know of any free virus killers still available, but AVG are giving away a free copy of there AVG Anti-Virus 6 for a limited time only, check out the link on download section.