HD Doctor Blog

What is a computer virus and how do you get one?

If you depend on the information stored on your personal computer, you need to understand how computer viruses spread, and you should use anti-virus software to reduce the chance that a computer virus will infect your programs and files.

A computer virus is a program that makes copies of itself and infects files. Computer viruses can spread to other computers and files whenever infected files are exchanged. Often infected files come as email attachments, even from people you know. The email senders have no idea that they are passing on a file with a virus in it.

Some computer viruses can erase or change the information stored on your…

When it comes to data storage, viruses can be divided into two basic categories:

• Viruses that delete data.
• Viruses that corrupt data.

Viruses that delete data will tell the Operating System (such as Windows) to flag files as being deleted. The data itself becomes unavailable but it still exists on the platters until it’s overwritten. This data is recoverable using 3rd-party data recovery softwares which will scan the platters and mark recognizable files as not deleted, effectively restoring them to the directory structure.

 Viruses that corrupt data are the most dangerous because they overwrite files with garbage data and then possibly flag them as deleted. This makes the data unrecoverable.
In either case,…

Computer viruses are proving to be highly complex but preventing viruses from infecting your computer systems is simple. Use two well-known brands of anti-virus software and keep them as current as possible.

Beyond that, there are some simple, common sense procedures that everyone should use, whether at work or in the home computing environment. Never open a file whose origins are unknown. In a simpler day, that wisdom only applied to executable files, or files that did something. They have the suffixes .exe, .com and .bat and each can start a program on your computer. These viruses spread through games downloaded from the Internet, on borrowed diskettes and through the old ‘bulletin board’ services.

Today, unfortunately, a whole new wave…