| A computer
virus is a program that spreads from computer to computer
by making copies of itself, usually without the user’s
knowledge. Viruses usually have harmful side-effects ranging
from displaying irritating messages to deleting of all files
on your computer or in extreme cases massive corruption of
data on your system.
How does my system get infected?
A virus program needs to be run before it can infect your
computer. Viruses have ways of ensuring this happens. They
can hide themselves in programs that automatically run on
your computer. You might receive an infected file on a disk,
email or internet download. As soon as you launch the file
the virus code runs and the virus can then copy itself to
other files on your system.
Imagine what would happen if your accounts system has been
infected. The data in the system is now unreliable. You have
backups of the data but you don’t know when you got
the virus. So you can’t simply restore your backup as
they are equally unreliable. Page
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