More and more often people mention a new malicious virus that is threatening to harm not your human immune system, but that of your personal computer. Originating from Latin, a virus is a poison that can cause a negative effect to the person that carries it. After the twentieth centurys technology boom, old terms have been reintroduced to describe the processes and/or practices of technological innovations. One of those terms is that of a computer virus.

Computer viruses are software programs deliberately designed to interfere with the usual computer operations, by recording, transmitting, corrupting, or deleting data. Some of these malicious programs also have the ability to copy themselves to other computer systems and thus spread to new unaffected computer units, much alike a human virus does. Since the introduction of the Internet, these dangerous software programs have increased in number and frequency, causing people to take measures against them. Nobody wishes to experience the frustration and anxiety of having to find ways to retrieve precious personal or business-related data, which most of the times are damaged severely or lost forever. In fact, the computer viruses can be of any form. They range from annoying software programs that run during setup mode and decrease a computers ability to function properly by slowing things down or causing problems during an otherwise simple process, to complex destructive programs that may lead to the complete deletion of a computers memory or other important components distraction.

The most common way of getting a virus is from an email attachment, which is a file connected to an email message. Ranging from a simple Word or Excel file and images in JPEGs or GIFs formats, to any other type of file, even small computer programs, viruses travel through the cyberspace generating distraction and annoyance among all computer holders. The most annoying thing of all is that usually everything begins from an unwary computer user who shares the malicious file with others without even knowing it. In fact, even those wary computer savvies can be mislead, as some of the viruses existing today are extremely sophisticated forms of malicious software programs that run at the background of other computer programs, kwon also as worms. Alarmingly, these more advanced virus forms can replicate and send themselves automatically to other computers by controlling other software programs, such as an email sharing application.

The most recent forms of highly dangerous viruses were given the name Trojans, experts named them after the famous Trojan horse, as they can falsely appear to be beneficial programs which the user decides to download to his computer hard-drive. Some even perform the task for which they have been downloaded, before damaging the affected one or the computers connected to it.