Computer Virus Essay

Introduction

This report will look at viruses. It will look at what a virus is and what they do it will also look at why people create viruses and for what purpose. The report will also look at examples of famous well known viruses and the ways you can defend against viruses.

What is a Virus?

Firstly this report will look at the definition of a computer virus. This definition taken from Microsoft (n.d.) tells us what a virus is “Computer viruses are small software programs that are designed to spread from one computer to another and to interfere with computer operation.” This definition tells us that viruses are designed to spread from one computer to another this could be through email attachments sent between friends or a multitude of

These are all very different reasons as to why someone may create a virus. Although usually they are motivated to do it by financial gain this could be done by stealing peoples bank passwords with a virus hidden in an email attachment that when opened records what people type and sends it to the virus

However there are some viruses that are created as a bit of fun by some developers. An example given by Georgi Dalakov (n.d.) in an article on History-Computer.com is the Creeper virus. This virus was designed to not be destructive at all by deleting data or other things that would really affect the user but just displayed a message on the user’s screen which would be little more than an annoyance. The message that was displayed is “I’M THE CREEPER : CATCH ME IF YOU CAN”. This virus was created around 1970 by Robert Thomas before the term computer virus existed so some credit this as the first example of a self-replicating computer