The Internet has been abuzz lately claiming we are in the 25th year of the computer virus. After digging through some Web sites offering insight into the history of the computer virus, only one thing is constant: Elk Cloner was not the first. But if we fast-forward to the 1970s, the world's first computer virus actually sprang up. As if you needed more evidence to prove this isn't the 25th anniversary of the computer virus, 1975 ushered in one of the most legendary viruses ever: Pervading Animal.
Rising Company showed that a total of 133,717 new viruses affected the Chinese mainland in the first half of 2007. If it spreads, technology experts warn the latest strains of the insidious RINBOT computer virus could hijack network systems of businesses worldwide. The recommended method of detecting and cleaning the computer from any computer viruses or other malware is an anti-virus protection program. In order for a computer virus to affect you, it requires some explicit action on your part. don't click on attachments and your inbox will be safe from computer viruses. One should note that in 1989 there began total epidemics of computer viruses in Russia, caused by the same "Cascade", "Jerusalem" and "Vienna", which besieged the computers of Russian users.
Viruses are malicious software programs that have been designed by other computer users to cause destruction and havoc on a computer and spread themselves to other computers where they can repeat the process. Once the virus is made, it is often distributed through shareware, pirated software, e-mail, P2P programs, or other programs where users share data. The virus is interesting because of its ability to attach itself to other programs and cause them to become viruses as well. Most likely the process of changing priorities will resemble the process of DOS dying and new operating systems gaining strength together with their specific programs.
Besides that the infected system "hanged" if some of the programs tried to reach outside the V86 mode, for example to determine the presence of extended memory. Periodically on the mainframes at that period of time there appeared programs called "the rabbit". These programs cloned themselves, occupied system resources, thus lowering the productivity of the system. As a result there appears a huge number of miscellaneous "Trojan horses", programs, doing some kind of harm to the system when started.
The anti-virus programs developers had nothing to do but rush to adjust the polymorphous viruses detecting technique, designed so far just for DOS-viruses, to the new conditions. There from virus has made the way to USA where through the staff oversight infected at once several popular Web servers that started to distribute infected game programs. There may appear other problems who which might bring a lot of trouble to users and enough extra work to the developers of anti-virus programs. Anti-virus programs aren't very good at detecting Trojan horse programs, so be extremely careful about opening text-only files and Word/Excel documents from unknown or 'dubious' sources.
Source: http://www.bybyespyware.net
