| A
software
program
first written Rich Skrenta in 1982
who was a 15-year old high school student. Known as The Elk
Cloner this virus spread to other computers by monitoring
the floppy drive and copying itself to any floppy diskette that was
inserted into the computer. Once a floppy diskette became infected
it would infect all other computers that disk was inserted into,
each computer that was infected would then infect every floppy
diskette inserted into it. A computer that was infected would also
display a short poem on every 50th boot.
Fred Cohen
in 1983 later coined the term
virus in
a 1984
research paper as "a computer program that can affect other computer
programs by modifying them in such a way as to include a (possibly
evolved) copy of itself." Today a computer virus is a software program,
script,
or macro
that has been designed to infect, destroy, modify, or cause other
problems with a
computer
or software programs. Users can protect themselves and remove any
viruses on the computer by installing an
antivirus protection program, which is designed to detect,
protect, and clean any computer viruses.
- For more information on computer
viruses, see our virus info page.
- Information about creating a virus is found on
document CH000653.
- Information about how your computer becomes infected with
spyware, viruses and other malware can be found on
document CH001045.
Also see: Antivirus, Boot
sector virus, CMOS virus, Companion
virus, Executable virus, Hoax,
Intruder,
Logic bomb, Macro
virus, MBR virus, Multipart
virus, Non resident virus, Overwrite
virus, Polymorphic virus, Resident
virus, Stealth virus, Trojan horse,
Vaccine, Security
definitions, Worm,
Zoo
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| Resolved |
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