First of all, I'll dispell a theory that a computer virus is not a small organism that gets transferred through using a keyboard. You may laugh, but I have had people asking me this!

The true and basic definition of a computer virus is a small program, that was written by someone designed to self-propagate. That's the definition in it's simplest form.

To be slightly more technical about it, a virus is essentially a small piece of computer code that was written to exploit a vulnerability or feature in the operating system, application or communication system of a computer.

Viruses are so dubbed 'malicious code', and usually constitutes a misuse of a feature in an application, allowing more things to be done than should be allowed. This is very apparent in many of Microsoft's applications.

What new virus? ...

New viruses are discovered every week. The current 'top of the pops' in the virus charts can be found on the next page, entitled Latest Viruses. This is a real list of viruses currently out in circulation. Take a look at their details by clicking on them.

Modern Viruses are designed/written to self propagate. In other words they have it in their power to spread through the means of a variety of methods, the main one being email. Although some of the newer sophisticated viruses have the ability to email themselves without the use of your email software.

Email viruses are usually triggered by a person's curiosity to open the unknown message from a friend for example. Often the friend has unknowingly sent the email, or rather the friend was curious and opened the email triggering the virus to email you and everyone else in their address book. This is just one example of what a virus can do.

The aim of the writers basically, is to cause as much disruption as possible, usually causing some sort of damage before spreading. For example, deleting files, deleting/renaming system files (wrecking the operating system), flooding email programs etc. Perhaps even destroy the computer itself through accessing the BIOS. This has been known with some viruses and hardware.

Viruses can spread through boot disks, email, internet relay chat and instant messaging clients (mIRC, ICQ, IRC, Microsoft Messenger etc). Also Microsoft Office documents (macros), web pages in the form of Java applets and ActiveX controls. The latter are programming languages that are present in a lot of applications and web sites for legitimate purposes.

Writing code to self propagate and cause damage to people's computers is an illegal offense in the eyes of the law in most countries. The severity of the crime is increasing every year as the malicious code gets more complex to circumvent security.

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